Re: [orca-list] Punctuation, capital letters, exchange of characters and strings, generally error in the design of Orca

[Jan Buchal <buchal brailcom org>]

> > > > > "WW" == Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM> writes:

    WW> Hi Jan:
    >> I cannot agree with this. Maybe it is not supported by Gnome
    >> Speech, but the important ones certainly are supported by Speech
    >> Dispatcher. We have been trying to explain this thing to the Orca
    >> developers and offer the project, but I must say that with very
    >> little success.

    WW> I may be confused. My understanding of what speech dispatcher
    WW> provides has changed several times as the result of
    WW> conversations with Brailcom people. At one time, my
    WW> understanding was that speech dispatcher would automatically
    WW> handle all sorts of things, such as verbalized capitalization,
    WW> audio cues, punctuation, etc. If the engine didn't support it,
    WW> speech dispatcher would supply it.
You understood the thing in a wrong way.

    WW> Based upon recent conversations, my current understanding of
    WW> speech dispatcher is that it merely passes text on to the speech
    WW> engine with some additional engine-specific markup if the engine
    WW> supported it.
Yes.


    WW> I believe the words were "it's just a speech *dispatcher*".
Yes, it can be said so.

    WW> So, if the speech engine doesn't support things such as
    WW> verbalized or audio cues for capital letters, the user will not
    WW> get those features.
Yes, but there exists a solution.

    WW> If this is the case, we have a fundamental disagreement that we
    WW> need to get past.
I don't think that it is a disagreement but rather a misunderstanding.

    WW> My argument is that a user wants a feature and they don't care
    WW> how it is delivered. They just want it to work.
Mr. Zamazal has already answered. Apart from this we have implemented
this functionality in Festival through Festival Freebsoft Utils and in
cooperation with Jonathan Duddington we have achieved that it is
implemented in Espeak as well. IBM TTS module in SD emulates much of
this functionality and if there is need it is possible to find a
solution for other speech engines as well.

    WW> My impression from Brailcom is that the speech engine itself
    WW> must provide the feature; if the engine doesn't do it, the user
    WW> must negotiate with the engine provider to get the feature
    WW> added. If this is an accurate impression, I do not believe it is
    WW> a practical stance to take and it is not being done with the
    WW> best interests of the end user in mind.
This is a wrong impression. It was us who did the work or our colleagues
and it should remain so.

    >> So lets go back to a constructive solution

    WW> I agree. Let's focus on the user requirements proposed in
    WW> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2008-March/msg00566.html
    WW> and discuss how we can deliver these requirements when also
    WW> dealing with speech engines that do not have direct support for
    WW> them.
This discussion has already taken place. You can see the results on
http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api . As Mr. Hanke wrote in a previous
email it is nothing closed and we welcome any suggestions and
improvements. I don't see any meaning in starting from the very begin
again.


Have a nice day


-- 

Jan Buchal
Tel: (00420) 24 24 86 008
Mob: (00420) 608023021