Re: Thoughts on speech

[Marco Zehe <marco zehe googlemail com>]

Hi there!

After reading comments on this subject from the past couple of weeks, I
can't help but think that, either I'm doing something wrong, or people
are so used to things not quite working right that they're simply
overlooking these. So I'd like to recap my recent experience getting
Speech-Dispatcher installed in a Ubuntu Gutsy system.

First, I could not get the demon to start after I had installed SD. I
actually had to reboot the system.

Second, after reboot was finished, Gnome-Speech, which was still
configured as Orca's main speech server, was completely gone. There was
no speech, and since I didn't have a braille display, I was left
completely in the dark. I had to "blindly" start gnome-terminal, delete
my .orca settings folder, and shutdown and re-run Orca from the command
line to choose SD from the text-based initial setup.

Third, after I had it up and running, I found that often, two chunks of
stuff to be spoken would overlap, especially when Orca was speaking
something and I was using the keyboard to either type in something or
navigate. For example: I was going through the Orca Preferences dialog.
I had Key Echo set to Characters, and everytime I hit TAB to go to the
next control, it would take over half a second before Orca stopped
speaking the previous control that I was not interested in. Within that
half second, on a second audio channel, it would speak the fact that I
had pressed TAB. So I had both an overlap in speech output coming from
the SAME product, and a delay in the speech synth shutting up speaking
the control I was not interested in. To me, this is unnerving, if not
even unacceptable behaviour. If I press something like the TAB or an
arrow key, I want the speech engine to shut up immediately and speak the
new chunk of information relevant to me, and not think about whether it
should stop speaking and pick up the new chunk at its own leisure.

Are other people not bothered by this behaviour?

BTW this was using eSpeak as the synth, but the same was also observed
using IBM TTS.

Gnome-Speech, on the other hand, has never given me that trouble. Also,
in my opinion, Gnome-Speeech reacts faster to keyboard navigation with
any synth than Speech-Dspatcher does.

Any thoughts?

Marco