Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)



You have to watch out with eloquence.  There are words it totally craps out on you for.  If you have the 
particle web followed by hes and then day all as one single word (don't do it!,  Do *not* do it!), Eloquence 
will crash.  

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of kendell clark
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2014 1:59 AM
To: Hadi Rezaee; orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes 
on top :)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

hi
I know of this one. It has something to do with period symbols, followed by an underline, followed by a 0. It 
makes eloquence announce that as D O T H U N D R E D followed by whatever you're listening to.
It turns ._2 to D O T H U N D R E D T W E N T Y , ./._3 into ... etc.
This is closed source software, and I don't see this ever getting fixed. I hate to be a bearer of bad news, 
but this is precisely why some of  us have switched over to espeak, because of eloquence's issues that just 
will not ever get fixed. This might be a speech-dispatcher  thing, or it could be eloquence itself. I've been 
working for, I think, about a year and a half, maybe 2 years, trying very painstakingly, to get espeak's US 
english up to snuff, and it's mostly there. It does have some issues that have more to do with rules, how 
espeak interprets teh text, which I'm still struggling with. But it's usable now. IT was tons worse when I 
first started. I now keep eloq around mostly to throw words at, or in case espeak breaks horribly, which does 
happen occasionally.


On 08/29/2014 01:41 AM, Hadi Rezaee wrote:
I just wanted to send a mail and  Upvote what thomas said I have 
purchaced voxin because I really can't go along with espeak, and it is 
extremely terrible when reading package names. I'm just a new user to 
linux, but just wanted to mention that the punctuation thingy is badly 
broken with elequence and orca.

On 8/29/2014 11:06 AM, Thomas Ward wrote:
Storm,

The shortcomings of Speech Dispatcher are well known to me. For what 
its worth I am a software developer and an end user, and I empathize 
with your and others frustrations with the current technology. In 
many ways I have similar frustrations with Speech Dispatcher but for 
slightly differing reasons.

Unlike some on this list I don't exclusively rely upon free software 
like Espeak. I have purchased a number of commercial text to speech 
systems like Dectalk, Eloquence, and Cepstral, and am just as 
disappointed with Speech Dispatcher's lackluster support for them as 
I am with its support for Espeak. After all, I might even have more 
of a reason to gripe since I paid money for what were supposedly 
better quality text to speech systems, but am getting lackluster 
results because there is a definite and obvious difference in 
performance with the way Orca did with those synthesizers using Gnome 
Speech and the performance Orca has with using Speech dispatcher. Its 
clearly a case of Speech Dispatcher being a less desirable solution 
for handling speech drivers.

The point here is this. So far I have heard a few suggestions of 
adding direct support for Espeak in Orca. Basically, writing a Espeak 
module that gives Orca direct control over the TTS output.
While I see where people are going with this I see two major problems 
with it.

First, adding Espeak support to Orca assumes everyone uses Espeak, 
and only benefits Espeak users. Anyone who happens to use something 
like a commercial speech solution like Cepstral Dianne or a free 
speech solution like Festival still get shorted. The developer 
resolves the problem with Orca and Espeak, which is fine if one 
happens to be using Espeak, but does nothing for the rest of us who 
may have other preferences.

Therefore unless we are looking into the option of supporting every 
speech system directly by Orca I am not in favor of supporting Espeak 
directly. Its a lot of work that only supports a single text to 
speech system, and there is a more effective way of fixing the 
problems with Espeak without resorting to direct Espeak support. 
Writing a better alternative to Speech Dispatcher may be such a 
solution, and not only resolve problems with Espeak but might offer 
improvements for Eloquence, Festival, Cepstral, etc as well.

Second, adding Espeak support to Orca only helps Orca. This does not 
offer a means of offering improved text to speech support to other 
applications and games. If we think about Orca and only Orca 
accessibility we may in fact be shortchanging ourselves in the long 
run by excluding more long term accessibility solutions.

For example, as many of you may know Microsoft Windows offers a 
speech API, Sapi, which is available to any and all applications.
It is used by screen readers like Jaws, NVDA, and Window-Eyes for 
traditional screen reader speech output, but is by no means limited 
in scope to screen readers. Jim Kitchen, a popular author of 
accessible audio games, has used Sapi to speak various things in his 
games. Nextup has a number of speech enabled applications like 
TextAloud, WeatherAloud, and NewsAloud that speaks the weather, news, 
and various other things aloud via Sapi voices.
Microsoft has a map program that speaks driving or walking directions 
aloud as well. My point being that text to speech support has many 
applications besides screen readers and we should not shortchange 
ourselves by focusing exclusively on Orca, and ignoring the bigger 
picture here.

Yes, Speech Dispatcher has problems, and here is an opportunity to 
address that issue. Rather than including support directly into Orca 
I think what we need to do is replace Speech Dispatcher with a more 
stable, more reliable, API for text to speech that does everything 
Sapi does for Windows users. Yeah, we can use it in Orca for speech 
output, but consider developing something that can be used in talking 
weather applications, news applications, e-book readers, whatever. 
Plus offer support for as many free and commercial speech engines are 
out there so that the user can use what he or she wants to use rather 
than limiting ourselves to one and only one text to speech system.

I know, for example, I read a lot of books. Quite a number of them 
are e-books. However, when reading books I find Espeak gets on my 
nerves. Espeak is alright for day to day tasks like checking mail, 
writing code, or something like that but not really for reading a 
good book. For that I switch over to one of the Cepstral voices which 
is more human sounding, more realistic, and is the reason I was 
willing to put a little money out for some higher quality voices for 
Linux. Therefore if I took time out of my day to write such a speech 
system I'd want to be able to be able to choose which text to speech 
system I want for specific situations than exclusively devoting all 
my effort into one text to speech system which I tolerate more than 
like.

So to sum up my thoughts let's consider expanding this support a bit, 
not focus so much on including Espeak support into Orca, and see what 
we can do to come up with a better alternative to speech Dispatcher 
rather than putting all or eggs in one basket with Orca and Espeak.

On 8/27/14, Storm Dragon <stormdragon2976 gmail com> wrote:
Howdy, Nearly every other screen reader has multiple ways to 
interact with speech. NVDA has a built in espeak, and the other 
nonfree readers have synths as well, I think most have a built in 
Eloquence. Never once, have I heard any of those users complain that 
their screen reader has entirely too many ways to talk. Also, as far 
as I am aware, no one has ever said "Man, I really wish my screen 
reader had to jump through layer after layer of junk to speak." 
Speech-dispatcher is ok, for minimal usage, but it crashes with 
alsa, has odd puctuation inconsistancies, and is slow as molasses. 
The last time development of speech-dispatcher even reached a 
snail's pace was when open-speech or whatever was called was made 
because people weree frustrated with the lack of progress made by 
speech-dispatcher. I'm not even asking to replace spd. Let the 
people who like it use it. That's one thing that makes Linux rock, 
there's usually more than one way to do things. for some people, 
speech-dispatcher may be fine. for me, it's falling rather short. 
Also, with a reliable way to deliver speech, speech-dispatcher can 
drag on it its currently abysmally slow progress, and we can have 
fully working espeak.
Speech-dispatcher has been around and for a long time now, and there 
still not full support for espeak... No way to use variants, and you 
have to hack it to use freasonably fast espeak. Thanks Storm
_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing 
list orca-list gnome org 
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Visit 
http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The manual 
is at 
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html


The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp

_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list 
orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list 
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The 
manual is at 
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html


The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJUACTGAAoJEGYgJ5/kqBTd15gQAKeeuRBN2iXQyHKFJuETPGrx
DaFlmzaWnWNIHG1rAFJEftIDPg/y2DLSYwsu2c2J5Hdbnnvi/YdB0tp/ZKzglXGu
P/5ii3imwPdZ45dF/S1S76BH2d7uYHp6YN/R0zHsBuXwL5u1CmewcST9YyF7mw+X
8ZUCqjHmiLD/zRnYgvmLkbH+jXHYMnG+CAHXl8OL2wqzq73M5BMLY4y77ktSQe+p
9fhb5/pE5qzEdlj1e6S4qnbehhxoSt514lFIY3rCQv63RHSBXlPCZNN6/8o7sZsV
MVRa8RBqxW13FdUV18TVifWFJKbulqDJBIf9/IjAK2AhHN5eaLGtupDyOsWUOREE
jlg2atKPIFIFkmYiTj7MCKZVonJH7w4GkfWBNAdEvvEw74SjU4/+VzY7OnBW22ae
cO9lj9M8Vc39DRbrlWSW5OOo4Y43ydiA1P420mYhlCtmHTrkrNHuYSPnpYno1epB
+teFcvBu37ppmsxDfctTrLh/I2ymSQWmvJ5ePf+pTVgJrb6JdPqEY+yT0YDF3LuT
Kjv8kR1ieTANf/dWMyETuDx1hNjRSbCXQBX4tELTjvQQi8bKrFoVgXHiAzaNxtc2
XP4/sSa9tqgrvBKoab0eD4PXF0isPOnOVl5OzOM54b0CAtadjo/DeHqlwQdMNxAD
3gQVvw/GRRFIjIpxEdi5
=0AHO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at 
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]