Re: [orca-list] need help getting espeak working.

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

I think most of the questions have been answered on this topic, but I
would just add, espeak I feel works better with speech-dispatcher (the
espeak specific one in speech-dispatcher 0.6.4) than it does with
gnome-speech. A couple of reasons for this.
1. speech-dispatcher handles the audio output, so you don't have varying
qualities or limitations of output (eg. portaudio v18 doesn't have alsa
support, so preventing software mixing of audio on sound cards which
don't have hardware mixing (so preventing audio output whilst speech is
being produced, or vice versa). Portaudio v19 has alsa support, but when
I last used portaudio v19 it varied on different hardware as to how well
it performed (one sound card worked fine, but the other gave such a
delay it would be useless for speech feedback from a screen reader
(about a few seconds delay)). Also as another note, speech-dispatcher I
don't think needs espeak to have output built in (it can be compiled
without portaudio), as speech-dispatcher is handling the audio output
and espeak only needs to pass data back to speech-dispatcher.
2. Speech-dispatcher is not gnome specific, so some apps which you may
try and use (eg. speechd-el for speech output from emacs, or speechd-up
for speakup in text consoles) will not conflict as they all use
speech-dispatcher and speech-dispatcher will handle what has priority.
3. I don't know the actual reason, but there has been some attempts to
make espeak when used with gnome-speech use alsa (even when portaudio
v18 is used, look at the aoss command, and back in the archives if you
want detail), but this was likely to lead to choppy speech output on low
end systems and when any system is under load. Speech-dispatcher doesn't
seem to suffer from this.

Hope this extra information is useful.

From
Michael Whapples