[orca-list] Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 Release Candidate 1 (request for help with testing)

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 Release Candidate 1
==============================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability
of Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7-rc1 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project. This is a release candidate, we kindly ask you for your
help with testing it before the official release.
Please read `NOTES' bellow.

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
  synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
  synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
  of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
  is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
  to speech synthesis.

  Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

  - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
    connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
    and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

  - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers
    so that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
    synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
    and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS are supported. Festival
    is an advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting various
    languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual synthesizer.

  - Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
    settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interface. An Elisp
    library is developed as a separate project speechd-el. Possibly
    an interface to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.6.7?

 - Setting of preferred audio output method is now centralized in
   speechd.conf instead of being scattered around the various
   output module configurations.

 - 'spd-conf' configuration, diagnostics and troubleshooting tool
   now makes it easy to create a user configuration for Speech
   Dispatcher or to send a request for help with all appropriate
   logging information

 - Dummy output module which attempts to play a pre-recorded help
   message via various sound systems when all other modules fail

 - Possibility to switch on verbose logging over SSIP
   for easy debugging and bug-reporting from client applications

 - Volume settings in Pulse Audio and avoidance of having to reopen
   the PA connection on every synthesis request

 - Punctuation mechanism in IBM TTS is now configurable

 - Bugfixes.

 NOTES (0.6.7)

   - There are changes in the configuration file since the previous
     release. It is highly recommended to replace your speechd.conf
     file with the speechd.conf provided in this package and copy your
     settings there if you are upgrading from 0.6.6 or any older
     versions. The old configuration file should also work, but
     audio output method settings in output modules configuration
     will have no effect.

   - By default, the communication port of Speech Dispatcher is only
     opened for localhost connections. Please see the
     LocalhostAccessOnly option in speechd.conf for information on how
     to allow connections from other manchines as well.

   - Pulse Audio support is still in an experimental stage and might
     not work with new versions of PA.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.7-rc1.tar.gz

  Corresponding Debian and Ubuntu packages can be found in

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/snapshot-debian/
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/snapshot-ubuntu/

  We recommend you to fetch the sound icons for use with Speech Dispatcher.
  They are available at

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at <speechd-bugs lists freebsoft org>. For other
  contact please use <speechd lists freebsoft org>

Happy synthesizing!