Speech Dispatcher 0.4 released (and about it's connection to gnome-speech)

[Hynek Hanke <hanke volny cz>]

Hi everyone,

I'm sending a release announce of a project we are developing here in
Czech Republic under the Free(b)Soft project
(http://www.freebsoft.org) in case someone is interested. 

I'm currently working on writing a gnome-speech output driver for
Speech Dispatcher. It already speaks (using the Speech Dispatcher
supported synthesizers) on my machine and you might expect more news
on it from me in short time.

We are also working on the index marking (or callbacks) support. We
already have such support in Festival, although the corresponding
interface in Speech Dispatcher is still missing (I hope it will
be available in the next release). If I understand correctly, this
might help gnome-speech with one of it's big problems.

Speech Dispatcher 0.4 released
==============================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the release
of Speech Dispatcher 0.4 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project.

* 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.

  The architecture of Speech Dispatcher is based on a proven
  client/server model. The basic means of client communication
  with Speech Dispatcher is through a TCP connection using the Speech
  Synthesis Interface Protocol (SSIP).

  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 and
    (non-free) Dectalk software are supported.

  - Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
    settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library and a Common Lisp interface. The
    Python interface is being worked on. An Elisp library is
    developed as a sperate project speechd-el. Possibly an interface
    to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.4?

  - Flite output is now installed with the 16-bit voice, if available.

  - The generic output module can now also set volume.

  - spd-say is now rewritten to accept the most important speech
    parameters and thus provide a simple but useful Speech Dispatcher
    client. Documentation is provided in info.

  - The C/C++ shared library interface now uses TCP_NODELAY to prevent
    timeouts and make the communication faster.

  - Bugfixes.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.4.tar.gz .

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

  Corresponding Debian packages are or soon will be available at your
  Debian distribution mirror. (We would highly appreciate any help
  with RPM distribution!)

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

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at <speechd bugs freebsoft org>. For other
  contact please use <speechd freebsoft org>
  

Happy synthesizing!