Re: [orca-list] eSpeak, Speech-dispatcher, Orca and voice variations in Gutsy

[Lorenzo Taylor <daxlinux gmail com>]

> Hi Lorenzo, I'm not quite sure which variations you mean.  Could you
> please give an example?  Which espeak version are you using and which
> voices would you like to see in Orca preferences voice selection?

I am currently running eSpeak version 1.29 with the default English
voice. I'm not sure about the other languages, but the english voice has
a variant property that is denoted by a + sign followed by a number at
the end of the voice name which changes parameters of the voice, such as
making it a female voice, a younger sounding voice or a croaky voice.
For example, there are 6 additional male variants which are called en+1
through en+6 and 3 female variants called en+11 through en+13. I would
like to see these variants if possible in Orca preferences for eSpeak,
both in the speech-dispatcher backend and if possible in the
gnome-speech backend as well. They don't necessarily have to be in the
voice selection dropdown box, but they can be in an additional variant
selector if that makes things easier for the developers, since I don't
know how involved this task may be.

> Speech Dispatcher supports several modes of capital letter recognition.
>  For example it can play a sound icon.  I'm not sure now, how this can
> be used with Orca.  I'll try to have a look at it.

eSpeak itself supports a click when a capital letter is encountered
using the -k1 option. I'm not sure how this works in libespeak or if
it's even implemented there. For example, try typing in a terminal:

espeak -k1 "Hello. This is a TEST."

to understand how this works. Of course you may need to replace espeak
with speak depending on your method of installation or your
distribution.

Live long and prosper,
Lorenzo