[orca-list] speech-dispatcher vs gnome speech services vs othervoices?

["Michael Whapples" <mwhapples aim com>]

> To put it simply, you may wish to use either gnome-speech or 
> speech-dispatcher, this is one of the things with Linux, the freedom of 
> choice. To save you some of the time of testing both and finding out which 
> are more suitable for you, here is a short summary of the advantages of 
> each.
>
> Gnome-speech is a gnome based system, normally used by gnome (GUI) apps. 
> It has a espeak specific driver built-in the stable versions, and it seems 
> to work well. Gnome-speech and espeak seem to work well, and as there is 
> the espeak specific driver in gnome-speech it provides a full list of the 
> espeak voices. In the past gnome-speech was the most direct way to get 
> speech output from orca, but now there is a speech-dispatcher back-end for 
> orca this advantage is no more as speech-dispatcher can be used more 
> directly.
>
> On the other hand speech-dispatcher is not a gnome-specific system, it may 
> be used by other apps, eg. speakup, emacs, etc. While it supports a good 
> number of synths, some are done through a generic module which issues bash 
> shell commands, so those drivers are less advanced. This was the state 
> with espeak and speech-dispatcher until this latest beta, but what I have 
> tried with the new speech-dispatcher beta it seems good with the espeak 
> specific driver. The main advantage to speech-dispatcher is the 
> compatibility issue, it can use alsa drivers for most synths (ALSA is the 
> sound system which is currently the main one used in the kernel, and 
> offers software sound mixing, and loads of advanced features), and as 
> speech-dispatcher isn't gnome specific then it manages speech synthesis 
> for both gnome and command line apps without conflicts. It is possible to 
> get gnome-speech to use alsa for audio, but it is a bit of a hack.
>
> So I would suggest speech-dispatcher, particularly with the latest beta 
> and the orca speech-dispatcher back-end, although it does mean compiling 
> speech-dispatcher from source if you want that beta version.
>
> I haven't up to now compared festival, espeak, flite, etc as those are 
> synthesisers and speech-dispatcher and gnome-speech are common access 
> systems (like sapi is on windows). I will now quickly discuss 
> synthesisers, eg. festival, espeak, flite, etc.
>
> Festival is a fairly widely known synthesiser supporting many features. 
> Many people complain that it is too big and too slow, and that considering 
> that the voice isn't great. You may wish to consider another.
>
> Flite is a lighter version of festival, only having one speaker it is 
> slightly limited and it isn't great on the performance.
>
> Espeak is my favourite, its light weight, responsive, and supports the 
> main features you want and many languages. Also it is an open source 
> project.
>
> Now I will move on to none free synths.
>
> There is a software dectalk for Linux. Gnome-speech has a driver for it 
> (but it may require gnome-speech being compiled from source depending on 
> the distro you use), and speech-dispatcher has a generic module for 
> dectalk.
>
> There is the IBMtts, sometimes known as viavoice, I believe the same as 
> eloquence, both gnome-speech and speech-dispatcher have specific drivers 
> for it (but it may require compiling either gnome-speech or 
> speech-dispatcher depending on distro).
>
> There are other synths, like cepstral, epos, freetts, etc but these are 
> too many to say here, refer to gnome-speech and speech-dispatcher 
> documentation to see what they support.
>
> From
> Michael Whapples
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Justin Mann" <w9fyi cox net>
> To: <orca-list gnome org>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 1:46 PM
> Subject: [orca-list] speech-dispatcher vs gnome speech services vs 
> othervoices?
>
>
> > Hi,
> > I am quite a newbie to using orca with unix, and some of the concepts
> > that go along with compiling from source, but there appears to be
> > soemthing that i am not getting here.  What is the difference in using
> > speech-dispatcher vs festival verses gnome speech services?
> > As of rigth now I find both festival and the e-speak gnome driver to
> > sound the same whether i am using either speech-dispatcher or just the
> > traditional gnome speech driver.  What am I missing here?
> > Finaly, am Ii expecting too much at this point to be able to use gnome
> > with orca, and have all my computing needs met?  I apologize for what
> > may appear to be rather obvious statements, but I need some help...
> > Justin