Re: [orca-list] Orca, Gnome Speech extreme latency, stalling

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hmmm....I wonder if this might have something to do with the audio system in use.  The Ubuntu folks have been looking at Pulse Audio, but I think that may end up resulting in some very poor audio performance.  Orca, for example, seems to be pretty responsive on my OpenSolaris box.

I'm CC'ing Luke from Ubuntu here to see if he can lend some insight.

Will

On Nov 3, 2008, at 1:13 PM, Stephen Clower wrote:

> Ved,
>
> I can confirm your findings with the latest Ubuntu Intrepid release. I have tried the OS on an older Compaq Presario running a single Pentium IV 2.53 GHZ CPU with 1GB of Ram, and a Dell Inspiron 1420 running a dual-core Pentium CPU at 1.67 GHZ with 2GB of Ram. There is plenty of hard disk space on both machines, and sound worked out of the box. Despite the tweaks I make to the sound system, bypassing Pulse Audio, switching to Dectalk and ViaVoice, and using options other than gnome-speech, orca (or sound output) is still very latent.
>
> Will, this is very noticeable with the default Ubuntu Hardy/Intrepid installations. Try using Pigeon, Evolution, and Firefox. Use basic navigation commands, silence speech with the Control key, and listen to what happens.
>
> For now, my Windows XP installation with Window-Eyes 7.01 responds instantly. I'm hoping that Orca on Gnome will soon follow as I really like how this environment is developing.
>
> Regards,
> Steve
>
>
> Zed Burnett wrote:Will,
> > The system is an HP tx2500z CTO, Turion Ultra 2.4GHz dual core, 4GB RAM, 100GB set aside for Intrepid, dual booting w/Vista.  I don't know exactly which Realtek codec is on this machine, but I had to add "options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=toshiba position_fix=1" to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base to make it work.  I got that from someone in an Ubuntu forum; I'm not sure if it's potentially relevant to the Orca behavior.  The chipset is the new AMD/ATI 780G (including graphics).  The BIOS on this machine has just been updated and that didn't seem to help (or hurt).
> >
> > To see if it had any affect, I set the CPU throttle options to performance, the full 2.4GHz.  It doesn't seem to make any difference, Orca is on right now and only speeking occasionally.  When it does work, there is substantial latency in everything, menus, typing, etc, ranging from an extra eighth of a second or so to several seconds.  
> >
> > If it were doing basic things reliably, like reading the applications menu, I would be testing it in Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgin, core things for the typical desktop user.  
> >
> > Thanks for your response.  Happy hunting and please do let me know if there is more I can do to help.
> >
> > Zed
> >
> > ----------------------------------------
> > > Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 12:15:51 -0500
> > > From: William Walker Sun COM
> > > Subject: Re: [orca-list] Orca, Gnome Speech extreme latency, stalling
> > > To: chophshiy live com
> > > CC: orca-list gnome org
> > >
> > > Hi Zed:
> > >
> > > Welcome to the list!  Can you tell us more about the hardware you are
> > > using and the exact things you are trying to access?  We can try to
> > > reproduce the problem here (or let you know if this is a known problem).
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > Will
> > >
> > > On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 11:12 -0600, Zed Burnett wrote:
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > Store, manage and share up to 5GB with Windows Live SkyDrive.
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> > _______________________________________________
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> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
>
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