Problems with "end" callback in Python

[Hynek Hanke]

James Simmons napsal(a)
> Unfortunately the words have long pauses between them.  It sounds like 
> the voice of Colossus having a really bad day.
Yes, because in this way, each time you send something to the 
synthesizer, you must wait until the synthesizer synthesizes it. If you 
would send a longer text however, the synthesizer can work in advance to 
the audio output, so it is much faster. Also, there is much less network 
overhead etc. And as you pointed out very correctly, the resulting sound 
will have much better quality because it will contain intonation etc.

So a better solution would be to insert index marks (see SSML 
specifications) into the text after each word and send it to Speech 
Dispatcher.

Not even this is optimal because you have to guess where the word 
boundaries are. A new implementation of Speech Dispatcher (which will 
however still take some time to finish) has a full solution to the 
problem. You only send the original text and the synthesizer itself will 
find word and sentence boundaries and will notify the client application 
when they are reached (together with the exact position in the original 
text).

The proposed insertion of custom SSML index marks into your text should 
however be a fairly good solution in your case. I hope you don't run 
into  another threading problems with pygtk. It is quite a problem that 
it is not thread safe.

With regards,
Hynek