Re: Orca free text-to-speech engines for ?

[Ricky Enger <renger carolina rr com>]

Hello Herman,

There are a couple of options for using Espeak with Orca, both of 
which require Speech Dispatcher.  Since there's a Ubuntu package for 
Speech Dispatcher, you can just apt-get install speech-dispatcher or 
if you like you can grab the tarball from: 
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/

Tomas Cerha has written a Speech Dispatcher backend for Orca and 
instructions for setting it up can be found at:
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten this setup to work for me because the 
Speech Dispatcher driver isn't showing up as an option in Orca speech 
preferences.  Perhaps Tomas could shed some light on what might be 
causing this, but in the meantime, here are instructions for getting 
Speech-dispatcher to work with Gnome Speech.

First you'll need to edit /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf to use 
Espeak as the default synth.  Uncomment the line which begins:
    AddModule "espeak-generic"

Next, change DefaultModule to point to Espeak instead of Flite.
DefaultModule espeak-generic

Save the conf file and restart Speech Dispatcher.

killall speech-dispatcher
speech-dispatcher

Now you'll want to test that Espeak is working with Speech Dispatcher.
sd-say "This is a test."

Assuming things are working correctly, you're ready to rebuild Gnome 
Speech to include the Speech Dispatcher driver.  You can just pull 
the latest Gnome Speech from CVS.  Assuming you don't have a cvsroot 
specified, do the following:
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome
cvs co gnome-speech

Now change to the directory where you've downloaded the sources and 
issue the following:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --with-speech-dispatcher
make install

Now, when you run Orca, you should see Speech Dispatcher as an option 
when Gnome Speech services has been selected.

Hth,
Ricky

At 07:51 AM 11/21/2006, Hermann wrote:
> Hello Lorenzo,
> I downloaded and installed eSpeak from the webpage you mentioned.
> It works fine as a stand allone version, even in diffeent language
> than English; I tried German.
> The next questin is how can I get it to work under Orca? I use Ubuntu
> 6.10, and the speech engine used by this distribution is
> gnome-speech-services.
> Is it possible to get eSpeak working with Orca and
> gnome-speech-services, or do I have to install speech-dispatcher?
> If that's the case, which steps must I take to set it up?
> Regards
> Hermann
>
>
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