Re: Orca speech rate and other Gnome settings

["Christophe Strobbe" <strobbe hdm-stuttgart de>]

Hi,

Am So, 13.01.2013, 22:41 schrieb Luke Yelavich:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 07:18:12AM EST, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
>> Thanks for the pointer. I found that eSpeak expects values between 80
>> and
>> 450 (default: 175) - at least on the command line:
>> <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/commands.html>
>> So I assume there is a conversion somewhere between the Orca Preferences
>> and the call to the eSpeak TTS. I didn't find that kind of conversion in
>> speak_lib.h (nor in several other source files from eSpeak).
>> The values in the Orca Preferences (0-100) clearly don't represent words
>> per minute.
>
> Orca uses speech-dispatcher, and speech-dispatcher applies a conversion,
> spreading the available synthesizer speech rates over 0-100

Thanks. I found the conversion from speech-dispatcher to eSpeak's rate at
<http://git.freebsoft.org/?p=speechd.git;a=blob;f=src/modules/espeak.c;hb=0ca7cc162c31daa5d6d35e9ce3e4171572eb1a95>:

static void espeak_set_rate(signed int rate)
{
  assert(rate >= -100 && rate <= +100);
  int speed;
  int normal_rate = EspeakNormalRate, max_rate = EspeakMaxRate, min_rate =
EspeakMinRate;
  if (rate < 0)
    speed = normal_rate + (normal_rate - min_rate) * rate / 100;
  else
    speed = normal_rate + (max_rate - normal_rate) * rate / 100;
  // some code snipped
}

However, this code assumes that EspeakMaxRate = 390 and EspeakNormalRate =
170, while the documentation at
<http://espeak.sourceforge.net/commands.html> mentions a max speed of 450,
and a default of 175.

Assuming that the code and documentation I consulted are up to date, there
are two discrepancies here.


(For the conversion between Orca's range of 1 - 100 and speech
dispatcher's range of -100 to +100, I currently assume the formula speechD
= (orca - 50) * 2. I have not found this documented anywhere.)

By the way, are there any plans to convert Orca's settings to gsettings in
the long run?


Best regards,

Christophe

-- 
Christophe Strobbe
Akademischer Mitarbeiter
Adaptive User Interfaces Research Group
Hochschule der Medien
Nobelstraße 10
70569 Stuttgart
Tel. +49 711 8923 2749