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

[Peter Vágner <peter v datagate sk>]

Hello,
The thing I am trying to point out is that wha Tomas fixed breaks 
consistency with other parts of Orca. With the patch applyed Gecko stuff 
totally overrides Orca character processing therefore I am not sure at 
this point but it is good idea to test his patch with gnome speech.
Just note the difference how review by characters work in flat review, 
in gnome-terminal, in Gedit, in evolution etc and you will be able to 
understand what I am trying to explain.
Of course adding an option and refactoring character processing is 
another issue as you have stated.
Please accept my apologies I was not clear enough and since these issues 
overlap I had to explicitly say which one am I speaking about seperatelly.

thanks

Peter



Willie Walker  wrote:
> 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