Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 Released

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7
=======================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability
of Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project. This is a minor release.  Please read 'What is new'
and 'NOTES' bellow.

* 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.

 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, Espeak
   and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS are supported. Festival
   is an advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting various
   languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual synthesizer.

 - 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. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interface. An Elisp
   library is developed as a separate project speechd-el. Possibly
   an interface to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.6.7?

- Setting of preferred audio output method is now centralized in
  speechd.conf instead of being scattered around the various
  output module configurations.

- 'spd-conf' configuration, diagnostics and troubleshooting tool
  now makes it easy to create a user configuration for Speech Dispatcher
  or to send a request for help with all appropriate logging information

- Dummy output module which attempts to play a pre-recorded help
  message via various sound systems when all other modules fail

- Possibility to switch on verbose logging over SSIP
  for easy debugging and bug-reporting from client applications

- Volume settings in Pulse Audio and avoidance of having to reopen
  the PA connection on every synthesis request

- Punctuation mechanism in IBM TTS is now configurable

- New generic output modules for Espeak with Mbrola
  and for Cepstral Swift.

- Bugfixes.

NOTES (0.6.7)

  - There are changes in the configuration file since the previous
    release. It is highly recommended to replace your speechd.conf
    file with the speechd.conf provided in this package and copy your
    settings there if you are upgrading from 0.6.6 or any older
    versions. The old configuration file should also work, but
    audio output method settings will in output modules configuration
    will have no effect.

  - By default, the communication port of Speech Dispatcher is only
    opened for localhost connections. Please see the
    LocalhostAccessOnly option in speechd.conf for information on how
    to allow connections from other manchines as well.

* Where to get it?

 You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.7.tar.gz

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

 Corresponding Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu packages will soon be available
 at your distribution mirrors.

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

* How to report bugs?

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


Happy synthesizing!