Spee

[Tim Cross]

Bill Cox writes:
 > I wanted to reply to Tim's specific speech-dispatcher related point:
 > 
 > On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Tim Cross <tcross at rapttech.com.au> wrote:
 > ...
 > > For the Linux environment, projects such as speech-dispatcher are of 
 > > critical
 > > importance. Good quality, stable text-to-speech is critical to all of the
 > > approaches. It is a fundamental requirement. One thing I do wish would 
 > > happen
 > > is an update of the IBM ViaVoice Outloud libraries for Linux. this is my
 > > preferred TTS engine. I wish it was updated so that it no longer required 
 > > the
 > > old stdc++ libraries and was available in 64 bit versions. I've tried most 
 > > of
 > > the other TTS solutions available for Linux, but none of them have the 
 > > clarity
 > > (especially at high speech rates), responsiveness and features of Viavoice.
 > 
 > The Outloud voice is still around, and available from oralux.org at
 > their cost.  I'm using it now, on Ubuntu Karmic x64.  This is a great
 > example of why speech-dispatcher is important.  I want to write an
 > emacspeak driver for SD, if I can ever find the time, because the
 > outloud driver is crazy-hard to get working in 64-bit land.
 > 
 > Bill

Yes, I run outloud under 32 bit. One of the reasons I've not yet moved to 64
bit is because I know setting up a 32 bit library to get it working will be a
pain. One which is made worse by the need to also install the older stdc++
libs and the c-compat lib etc. It really needs to be updated and linked
against modern 32 bit and 64 bit libs. 

A SD driver for emacspeak would be really good. However, it may be a bit
challenging to do as the emacspeak protocol is quite different and getting the
right mapping/translation could be hard. 

I remember writing emacspeak drivers for the cepstral TTS some years ago. One
of the issues I had to deal with was wanting to send well formed tags for the
SSML stuff. Emacspeak didn't easily support this due to how its architecture
worked. 

The good news is that Raman is quite prepared to modify how things work in
emacspeak provided it doesn't break existing driver support and provided you
can give him the necessary patches and any changes can be justified etc. 

Probably the biggest challenge you will encounter is just understanding how
the protocol works. Its not well documented, so you have to work it out by
studying the sources. This isn't too hard, but it does take some work. 

Probably your biggest challenge will be mapping the way emacspeak handles
voice personalities to SD commands. The use of different voices in emacspeak
is one of my favorite features of the system. I find it extremely useful in
tasks such as programming. 

Tim 

-- 
Tim Cross
tcross at rapttech.com.au

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.
-- 
Tim Cross
tcross at rapttech.com.au

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.