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

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Lukas Loehrer wrote:
> Willie Walker writes ("Re: eSpeak support in Orca -- what is the best way?"):
>   
> > We recently looked at making a gnome-speech driver for eSpeak, but the
> > main problem is that the eSpeak libraries have no facilities for sending
> > samples to the audio device.  Instead, it relies upon the application to
> > manage the audio.  
> >     
>
> I guess this is exactly why something like speech-dispatcher is a very
> good idea in the long run because it spares implementers of tts
> engines from dealing with the quirks of audio output architectures.
> Having written code for speech output with Alsa myself, I know this is
> not easy to get right, partly because low latency and instance
> interruptibility of playback is important in the tts scenario. Having
> this problem solved once and for all in a layer like speech-dispatcher
> will give people more time to focus on actual  tts code.
>   
Not sure I agree - the model where the TTS engine delivers its sample to 
a "third party" for dispatch to the audio subsystem can increase 
latency, rather than reduce it.  I do agree that there are other 
problems which such an architecture can avoid (for instance audio device 
contention).

A key requirement is the ability to quickly stop an utterance.  This can 
be difficult with multiple processes in the mix.  A corrollary to this 
is the need for good progress/speech marker support, since in many 
scenarios one needs to know how much was actually spoken before the 
interruption took place.

Bill
> Best rgards, Lukas
>
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