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

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

WW> In addition, I'd also like to hear more about the current state
WW> of TTSAPI. How complete is the implementation, where does it
WW> work, who is using it, etc.

The current implementation of the TTS API specification that were widely 
discussed earlier among Gnome, KDE, Brailcom and other developers is 
reasonably complete, but has not yet been tested in a real use scenario. 
It supports most of the MUST HAVE and SHOULD HAVE functionality of TTS 
API specification, alhough no emulation modules for dumb synthesizers 
have been implemented yet. It includes a completely separate 
asynchronous audio subsystem, currently with support of OpenAL (we are 
quite excited about the possible 3D audio capabilities we could get) and 
thus Alsa, OSS, Solaris etc. It is also possible retrieve the 
synthesized sound to the application as PCM data. We have a native 
module for Festival and eSpeak and are able to use all the existing 
Speech Dispatcher modules. There are 2 frameworks for output modules 
developement: C and Python. Callbacks are supported into detailed levels 
and there are as well other important features already implemented. Of 
course the interface is documented.

To sum it up, the current implementation offers the same TTS 
functionality that is already implemented as a part of Speech 
Dispatcher, but it adds considerable new functionality, based on our 
discussions about the TTS API requirements and specifications, and more 
important -- it adds new possibilities for further improvements.

However, the work should continue to add the missing smaller parts, 
stabilize, test and integrate the whole software component. As Milan 
Zamazal pointed out, this work is currently not happening due to lack of 
support and interest.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke