Re: [orca-list] Alsa and Gnome Speech

[Tomas Cerha <cerha brailcom org>]

Bob Tinney wrote:
> I have a multiple channel sound card, but speech dispatcher seems to block 
> gnome speech.  How can I temporarily disable speech dispatcher so I can open 
> Orca settings?

Hello, Speech Dispatcher doesn't block Gnome Speech, but there may be
two problems involved:

1) Gnome Speech drivers usually use OSS and OSS is what blocks other
audio applications.  The solution might be to use Gnome Speech with aoss
or to disable Gnome Speech (as described at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher).

2) The Gnome Speech and Speech Dispatcher's Festival drivers don't play
nicely together.  I have just looked at this shortly and I believe this
is because GS Festival driver tries to run its own Festival server.  SD,
on the other hand, uses the system wide Festival server.  These two
servers are probably in conflict and this makes Orca freeze when you try
to start preferences.  One solution is to disable the Festival module in
Speech Dispatcher configuration (see
/etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf).  This makes Orca usable (it
doesn't freeze anymore), but doesn't solve much if you want to use
Festival, since Festival is still not usable with GS because of the OSS
problem.  Better solution would be to disable Festival in Gnome Speech
but I don't know if this is possible (maybe Willie has an idea?).

I believe this issue deserves some attention.  It causes lots of
troubles to users.  I believe the problem is in the Gnome Speech
Festival driver, but I don't want to be partial and I welcome any
feedback on this.  I should probably fill in a bug report, but I would
like to hear what others think (especially those, who know more about
Gnome Speech).

Well, finally I should answer the original question.  Yes, you can
disable Speech Dispatcher temporarily.  In Debian or Ubuntu just run:

sudo /etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher stop

But you may try disabling the festival module first (as described
above).  Don't forget to restart SD after changing the config file:

sudo /etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher restart

Best regards

Tomas