Re: [orca-list] speech dispatcher (Re: punctuation not spoken properly when reviewingbycharacter in firefox)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Peter:

I believe we can separate this into two issues.  One is the proper use 
of the existing speechserver.py API, which is what Tomas' patch appears 
to address for Gecko.py.  At first glance, the patch looks good and 
appears to solve a problem where the wrong API call was used.

The other is determining where text preprocessing such as lexical 
analysis and word/grapheme expansion/substitution should be done.  The 
decision we made when working on Orca was to not depend upon the speech 
synthesis engine to provide these features because all speech synthesis 
engines do them differently (it at all).  Early on, my phone was 
already ringing because the experience was different between DECtalk 
users and FreeTTS users.  We started putting these features in the TTS 
layer for Orca.  The resulting model was to rely upon the speech engine 
to basically say what we told it to say, except for perhaps doing 
things such as abbreviation expansion and guessing proper 
pronunciations for homographs.

At the time, we were using gnome-speech exclusively, and it was 
basically a very thin wrapper on top of speech engines.  As a result, 
it was very simple to identify where things were working and failing.

Since that time, we now have experimental speech dispatcher support in 
Orca.  Among all the other stuff it does, speech dispatcher provides 
additional text preprocessing features that overlap with Orca's, and 
the two sometimes compete.  As a result, there is still work to do to 
identify when/where Orca's text preprocessing should be used and 
when/where speech dispatcher's should be used.  And, as is suggested, 
when to let the speech synthesis engine itself provide this 
functionality.  This is a very complex problem, both for the user and 
for the code.  For example, it starts becoming very difficult to 
identify where things are occurring.  For example, you mention that 
"Espeak will say capital before each such word".  This is not something 
I was aware of in my experiences with eSpeak, and my first guess was 
that speech dispatcher was actually doing this.

Moving forward, I would like to see a common speech service for the 
whole system.  This speech service should be available for many 
applications, both via the text and graphical consoles.  I would like 
to see this system provide features for handling capital letters, 
punctuation, pronunciation dictionaries, multilingual text, ACSS 
definitions to group speaking attributes such as voice/pitch/rate/etc, 
etc..    From my perspective, it would be great if much of this support 
could be done somewhere besides Orca because it would simplify Orca.  
Speech dispatcher is definitely something that seems to be close to 
providing this, and community members such as Kenny Hitt, David 
Csercsics, and Tomas Cerha have been working to make it more stable and 
appropriate.

Will

On Mar 5, 2008, at 7:49 AM, Peter Vágner wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Willie Walker  wrote / napísal(a):
> > Tomas:
> >
> > Thanks so much for finding this.  You rock.  We'll get this in for 
> the
> > GNOME 2.22.1 release on April 9.
> >
> Of course Tomas rocks but please have further look on our discussion 
> and reconsider if You can accept this as a final solution.
>
> thanks
>
> Peter