[g-a-devel]GNOME Speech 0.2.4 Release

[Marc Mulcahy <Marc Mulcahy Sun COM>]

Hi All,

GNOME Speech 0.2.4 is a major rewrite of the included drivers.  I'm 
happy to say that this version of GNOME Speech includes a driver for 
Cepstral's Theta text-to-speech engine.  the version in 0.2.4 does not 
work with the current download available from Cepstral's store, but we 
hope to have this issue resolved soon.

Here's a quick look at what's new:

* The .server files for all drivers which support speech callbacks now 
  include the GNOME_Speech_SpeechCallback:0.2 in the repo_ids field.

* The SynthesisDriver object is the central point where clients can query 
  for information about, and create speakers with, specific voices 
  provided 
  by an engine.  therefore, for consistancy's sake, I have removed the 
  "voice" parameter from all speakers.

* Added Theta driver which supports word-level speech 
callbacks. * Added Speech Interrupt test and wait test to test-speech.

* Rewrote the Fstival driver.  This rewrite includes:
	* One instance of Festival is now shared by all speakers-- no 
	  longer is Festival spawned for each speaker which is created.
	* The version number returned by getSynthesizerVersion is obtained 
	  from the Festival binary.
	* driverInit is implemented and returns FALSE if the Festival 
	  binary can not be found.

* Rewrote Viavoice Driver.  This rewrite includes:

	* All speakers now use one instance of Viavoice.
	* Added speech progress notifications after each word which is 
spoken.
	* AS mentioned above, removed the voice parameter from Viavoice 
	  speakers.

* Rewrote the DECTalk driver.  This rewrite includes:

	* All speakers share one instance of DECTalk software.
	* As mentioned above, removed the voice parameter from DECTalk 
	  speakers.
	* Added speech status callbacks after each word spoken.

* Rewrote the FreeTTS Driver.  This rewrite includes:

	* All speakers share one FreeTTS Voice.  This eliminates the bug 
	  which caused the FreeTTS driver to run out of memory when 
	  multiple 
	  speakers were created.
	 
* Specifying the path to DECTalk now works.
* Cleaned up IDL build system