Re: eSpeak support in Orca -- what is the best way?

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Henrik:

Perhaps the most expedient solution would be to write a basic driver 
layer for eSpeak, initially with gnome-speech wrapper interfaces, with 
the intention of moving it to Speech Dispatcher later on.  The basic 
APIs are I hope similar enough that only a modest amount of code would 
have to be discarded in the migration.

Maybe I am being naive about the reusability of such code, but I would 
hope that if the author of a gnome-speech eSpeak driver read and 
reviewed the Speech Dispatcher API first, you could end up with most of 
the code being reused when moving to SD, while not 'blocking' on the SD 
RFEs from the orca team.

I, too, would like to see orca and the rest of Gnome move to Speech 
Dispatcher, once the orca team's concerns are met.

Regards,

Bill

Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been working with Gilles Casse of Oralux on a spec for better 
> multilingual speech support in Ubuntu, and as it happens, the crux comes 
> down to support for eSpeak in Orca. Let me explain ...
>
> The aim of the MultilingualSpeechSynthesis spec is to extend our current 
> provision to synthesised speech in multiple languages right on the CD. 
> That is not possible with Festival because the voices are too big, but 
> should be possible with eSpeak. See: 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/MultilingualSpeechSynthesis
>
> We also plan to improve the speakup support on default systems and Live 
> CDs using eSpeak, which fits in well with the added language support. 
> However, the main focus of the Live CD is still going to be the Gnome 
> GUI. So we have to support both interfaces, and we want to do it with 
> the same speech synth to avoid duplication.
>
> But we won't move the Live CD from Festival to eSpeak until we are 
> confident that there is good support for eSpeak with Orca. (btw, many 
> people will still prefer Festival or other synths and we should have 
> good support for those and make sure installing and setting up is easy)
>
> I know I'm probably stirring up a old debate when I ask what the best 
> way to do that is. I guess there are two options:
>
> * Write a gnome-speech driver for eSpeak -- How much work is involved 
> with this? Gilles says he is willing to start on this.
> * Speech Dispacher support for Orca -- I know there have been issues 
> raised about this before. Some missing features are mentioned here: 
> http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher
>
> -- Using the Orca -> gnome-speech -> SpeechDispatcher -> eSpeak chain is 
> not really an option for a stable release I think.
>
> I'm not really technically qualified to have a firm opinion about which 
> route is best or easier to implement. I simply note that a solution is a 
> prerequisite for the multilingual Live CD and the enhanced speakup 
> support. In principle I'm a fan of the speech dispatcher approach 
> because I feel it open up more options for the future such as Orca 
> running on KDE, but if the missing features there mean holding up a spec 
> like multilingual support for a cycle or more then I'd like to consider 
> alternatives.
>
> I've made a spec describing what we need and briefly mention the two 
> options.
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/OrcaEspeak
>
> Another question is whether eSpeak itself is feature complete enough 
> (does not  support asynchronous calls ATM AFAIK), but this is mediated 
> by the ability to install Festival or something else post-install. I do 
> wonder how the user community would react to a sudden switch of default 
> synth though. Thoughts?
>
> Discuss :)
>
>
> Henrik
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