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



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





[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]