Speech Dispatcher 0.8 Released

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.8
=====================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of
Speech Dispatcher 0.8 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project.

* What is new in 0.8?

  * Python 3 compatibility of the Python bindings

  * User configuration, logs and runtime files are now stored in
    directories according to the XDG specification

  * Internationalization of spd-say and translations into Hungarian
    and Czech languages

  * Espeak output can now use libsonic for faster speech

  * Pico output module

  * Lots of bugfixes, cleanups and fine-tunnings

* Where to get it?

   You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
   
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.8.tar.gz

   We recommend you to fetch the sound icons for use with Speech 
Dispatcher.
   They are available at
   
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

   Corresponding distribution packages should soon be available at
   your distribution mirrors.

   The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

   Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
   synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
   synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
   of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
   is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
   to speech synthesis.

   Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

   - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
     connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
     and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

   - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers so
     that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
     synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
     and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS, Pico and others are
     supported. Festival is an advanced Free Software synthesizer
     supporting various languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual
     Free Software synthesizer.

   - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
     shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interfaces. An Elisp
     and Java libraries are developed as sperate projects speechd-el
     and speechd-java. Possibly an interface to any other language can
     be developed.

* How to report bugs?

   Please report bugs at 
https://its.freebsoft.org/its/issues/project/1876 .
   For other contact please use either the above link or our mailing 
list
   <speechd at lists.freebsoft.org> .


Happy synthesizing!