A bridge between speech-dispatcher and SAPI under Wine

[Zahari Yurukov]

Hi,
Since using self-voicing aplications under Wine is now possible, as long
as you have a speech synthesizer installed, isn't it possible for
speech-dispatcher to have a driver, which scans the installed
synthesizers under Wine, and if it founds such - makes them available
for native Linux applications?
Perhaps some code could be borowed from the OpenSAPI project (now
abandoned). As i heard, the problem of OpenSAPI's developers was
pulseaudio, which speech-dispatcher handles well now.

There are very good synthesizers under Linux, and I'm using ESpeak all
the time, but the lack of human-like voices is a huge barier for many
people to use Linux. The availability of such driver will eliminate that
barier.

Waiting for the developers of speech synthesizers to port them to Linux
is not a good idea for several reasons:
- They're waiting for a critical mas of users for this to be
economically worthful - which brings us in the beginning.
- Even if the big players port their synthersizers to Linux, they have
voices for a small number of languages. Some of them have voices for 30
languages, but this leaves many other languages out, besides the quality
of some voices is far from satisfying.
- Small teams wil never do that, unles Linux becomes the top used OS in
the world, or at least its usage increse dramaticly - they hardly
provide even a basic support now for their current platforms and are
saying "We have it for that OS, use what is available".
That's not fair for the Linux user, nor for those who want to use Linux,
but they can't cause they mis a perticular synthesizer. And having more
users is also good for the developers - they will recieve more
contributions, which in my opinion is very much needed in the world of
asistive technologies.

Best wishes,
Zahari