Speech Dispatcher on Ubuntu 8.10 with Alsa?

[Tomas Cerha]

Anthony Sales wrote:
> For Christmas I would like a step by step guide to getting Speech-Dispatcher
> working with Alsa on Ubuntu 8.10 with multi-channel sound support. 

Hello Anthony,

I just booted Vinux 1.2 CD on my notebook with Intel HDA soundcard and I
was able to get Orca speaking through Speech Dispatcher over ALSA with
totem playing an mp3 at the same time.

What I did:
  sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher python-speechd
  sudo gedit /etc/defaults/speech-dispatcher (overwrite 'no' to 'yes')
  sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

Then disabled PulseAudio in System/Preferences/Sessions,
set everything to ALSA in System/Preferences/Sound/Devices
and disabled all sound effects in System/Preferences/Sound/Sounds

The last is probably not necessary, but it caused ESD to block the sound
device.  I believe there is a way to force ESD to use ALSA as well to be
able to have system souns, but this is another story...

Then I restarted the Gnome session.  I had a problem in session startup,
since the session still tried to start pulseaudio-session, which was not
there anymore.  I guess it is possible to get around this by
uninstalling some other components, such as pulseaudio-module-*.
Anyway, I started a failsafe session and I was able to start Speech
Dispatcher:

  sudo /etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher start
  spd-say hello

I heard Hello from Espeak.  Orca preferences had the Speech Dispatcher
option (in Speech System!!!), so I switched to espeak over SD and chose
English.  Then I ran totem and started an mp3 playback.  Orca was still
speaking while the mp3 was playing.

Best regards, Tomas