Re: [orca-list] speech dispatcher with orca

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello Alonzo,
> From what you have said I assume you are a new comer to Linux, sorry if
this is wrong.

There are a few things you might want to do, some you will need to do,
to get speech-dispatcher working as you want.

First of all the error message you get is due to the speech-dispatcher
server not running. You can run it as your current user by running
speech-dispatcher (I can't remember what the ubuntu security settings
are, you may need to start speech-dispatcher with the sudo command (eg.
sudo speech-dispatcher)). I think you should be able to start
speech-dispatcher as a system wide service by running
/etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher start

Before you start speech-dispatcher you probably will need to configure
its settings. Edit /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf for general
speech-dispatcher settings (eg. output modules used, default rate,
default voice, etc), and edit the relevant files for the output modules
you want in /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/. These files follow the
standard of the hash (#) symbol meaning the line is a comment. These
files are fairly well commented to help in configuring
speech-dispatcher, and there are examples of lines in there (commented
out) for each setting.

There is one area which may be problematic on ubuntu, and that is the
audio output system to be used by the various speech-dispatcher modules.
If you are running speech-dispatcher as your user then use pulse audio
for output. If you decide to run speech-dispatcher as a system wide
server then things are much harder as you will need to reconfigure
ubuntu to not use pulseaudio and tell speech-dispatcher to use alsa (how
to configure ubuntu to not use pulseaudio is beyond what I am willing to
say as I don't actually use ubuntu, and might get quite involved, so I
recommend you to run speech-dispatcher as a user process unless you know
what you are doing or are likely to use something such as speakup which
may require speech-dispatcher outside your user sessions). It might be
easier to get speech-dispatcher working on a different Linux
distribution, but if you are going to continue with ubuntu and
speech-dispatcher, then I hope an ubuntu user can help you get this set
up.

Michael Whapples
On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 22:46 -0500, Alonzo wrote:
> Hello list,
> My name is Alonzo. I've been using ubuntu for about a week and rather
> enjoy it. I'm having trouble installing speech dispatcher or perhaps
> getting to work. I've installed everything successfully from the
> sinaptecs package manager. Then, when I go to the terminal and type hte
> command "spd-say" and hte the text I wanted spoken to me the terminal
> says
> client: speech dispatcher Failed to open: connection refused.
> Please adivce me what to do.
>
> Alonzo