Re: Thoughts on speech

[David Bolter <dtb gnome org>]

Hi Jan,

Jan Buchal wrote:
> > > > > > "WW" == Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM> writes:
> > > > > >             
>
>     WW> Hi All: Great IRC meeting yesterday. Thanks everyone for
>     WW> attending and participating. Here's some notes I took regarding
>     WW> speech:
>
>     WW> * While it may not be the pristine perfect solution, Speech
>     WW> Dispatcher seems to fit nicely into the overall requirements we
>     WW> need as a larger community.
>
>     WW> * Speech Dispatcher appears to have a lot of momentum around it,
>     WW> with groups such as OLPC, Ubuntu, KDE, etc., adopting it.
>
>     WW> * There are a number of questions regarding Speech Dispatcher:
>
>     WW> o Is the configuration simple enough and/or can it be made
>     WW> simpler?
>
>     WW> o What engines are supported now? What drivers are being
>     WW> written?
>
>     WW> o Cross platform compatibility. I tried compiling w/o success on
>     WW> Solaris last night. :-(
>
>     WW> o What additional work needs to be done to integrate it more
>     WW> tightly with Orca?
>
>     WW> These questions/problems seem pretty tractable and we already
>     WW> have a thriving community of capable people working on them. For
>     WW> example, Kenny, David, Tomas, and Luke have been going at it
>     WW> pretty hard (thanks) and we have a number of Orca users beating
>     WW> on the Orca/SpeechDispatcher interface daily. As a result, it's
>     WW> a lot further along than it was even a month ago.
>
>     WW> So, I'd like to propose that we consider a different task for
>     WW> funding as part of the GNOME Outreach Program.
> Well, I see it as very bad idea. Speech-dispatcher is financed by
> Brailcom long time already, and Brailcom is non profit organization. If
> you mean that we don't need support for our work then in this case our
> opinions are very different.
>   

That's important to know Jan, thanks. If Speech-dispatcher is under 
funded we should consider ways of correcting that. One of the goals of 
the Outreach Program is to bring new attention and fresh talent into our 
community. I think it would be great to have some kind of sustained 
funding for people already doing great work. I think that is probably a 
different program though. What do others think?

cheers,
David