Re: [orca-list] Orca-list Digest, Vol 43, Issue 41
- From: "Cearbhall O'Meadhra" <omeadhrac ncad ie>
- To: <orca-list gnome org>
- Subject: Re: [orca-list] Orca-list Digest, Vol 43, Issue 41
- Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:14:35 +0100
Hi,
I am using Fedora 11 and all is going well with Orca speaking through both
Espeak and Swift (Cepstral voices). Now I would like to channel the output
into my Plantronics C56/c60 headset which is connected by USB to the PC. I
have looked in Sounds under preferences on the system menu but this freezes
with the message "waiting fro response from the device" or something like
that. The only active object in the dialog is the cancel button.
I have a suggestion that Advanced Sound control might help. Can anyone
advise me?
All the best,
Cearbhall
T:(01) 6364364 M: 083 33 234 87 E: omeadhrac ncad ie
-----Original Message-----
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Behalf Of orca-list-request gnome org
Sent: 13 August 2009 18:45
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Orca-list Digest, Vol 43, Issue 41
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one blank
space arenot recognizedin thunderbird) (David E. Price)
2. Re: Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one blank
space arenot recognizedin thunderbird) (Paul Hunt)
3. Thread Hijacking (Willie Walker)
4. Repeated punctuation - bug #591724 (Re: Verbalized
punctuation (was Re: more than one blank space arenot
recognizedin thunderbird)) (Willie Walker)
5. Re: Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one blank
space arenot recognizedin thunderbird) (Willie Walker)
6. Re: Repeated punctuation - bug #591724 (Re: Verbalized
punctuation (was Re: more than one blank space arenot
recognizedin thunderbird)) (Willie Walker)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:35:11 -0400
From: "David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one
blank space arenot recognizedin thunderbird)
To: "Willie Walker" <William Walker Sun COM>, "Paul Hunt"
<huntp ukonline co uk>
Cc: orca-list gnome org
Message-ID: <AFAC351C6883499AA4E05F629C739720 D6DWVK91>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=response
Hi, Will,
The verbalized punctuation in Orca comes in after Orca has built up
the string to send to the synthesis engine. Thus, if Orca inserts a
'.' when building up a string, it will be verbalized if the user has
requested the relevant punctuation level.
Orca adds the '.' character to help with the prosody/pacing of spoken
output as well as the fundamental pitch contour. In this cycle, we
added the '.' character to the end of mnemonics because we had a
complaint:
without it, the pitch of the character being spoken was incorrect and
causing confusion.
I'm not sure that this is causing the problem. This issue has been around
for a while, and I notice it most when using period, exclamation, and
question marks. So, if you put in two spaces following one of these
punctuation characters, you hear the preceding punctuation character spoken
twice, such as "period period", "exclamation exclamation" or "question
question". I don't see how that is related to adding a following apostrophe
to the string.
I can't generate a debug log at the moment (the machine where I'm currently
working has gnome 2.16 and Orca 1.0), but I'll try to generate one tonight
on my laptop (gnome 2.26 and Orca from git before the last flag day). I'll
file a bug and add the debug log to it.
Thanks,
dave
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:46:09 +0100
From: Paul Hunt <huntp ukonline co uk>
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one
blank space arenot recognizedin thunderbird)
To: "David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>
Cc: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>, orca-list gnome org
Message-ID: <4A844351 3090507 ukonline co uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed
It makes sense to me.
Orca is announcing both the punctuation symbol that is actually in the text
and also another punctuationsymbol (the same one) that it is inserting
itself in order to give the text the correct inflection or to insert an
appropriate pause.
Obviously a bug.
On 13/08/09 17:35, David E. Price wrote:
Hi, Will,
The verbalized punctuation in Orca comes in after Orca has built up
the string to send to the synthesis engine. Thus, if Orca inserts a
'.' when building up a string, it will be verbalized if the user has
requested the relevant punctuation level.
Orca adds the '.' character to help with the prosody/pacing of spoken
output as well as the fundamental pitch contour. In this cycle, we
added the '.' character to the end of mnemonics because we had a
complaint: without it, the pitch of the character being spoken was
incorrect and causing confusion.
I'm not sure that this is causing the problem. This issue has been
around for a while, and I notice it most when using period,
exclamation, and question marks. So, if you put in two spaces
following one of these punctuation characters, you hear the preceding
punctuation character spoken twice, such as "period period",
"exclamation exclamation" or "question question". I don't see how that
is related to adding a following apostrophe to the string.
I can't generate a debug log at the moment (the machine where I'm
currently working has gnome 2.16 and Orca 1.0), but I'll try to
generate one tonight on my laptop (gnome 2.26 and Orca from git before
the last flag day). I'll file a bug and add the debug log to it.
Thanks,
dave
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:15:53 -0400
From: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
Subject: [orca-list] Thread Hijacking
To: orca <Orca-list gnome org>
Message-ID: <4A844A49 6010407 sun com>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hi All:
We have a "teachable moment" on our hands, and luckily it's not related to
recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Instead, it has to do with
thread hijacking.
We're experiencing the confusion that happens when someone decides to hijack
a thread to discuss a new issue. The result is that is becomes very hard to
track the discussion. For example, we currently have a thread where no
fewer than three issues are being discussed:
1) Jos? Vilmar Est?cio de Souza's original problem: "more than one
blank
space are not recognized in thunderbird"
2) A new addition (the first "hijack"):
"Do you hear the punctuation mark spoken twice?"
3) Another addition (the second "hijack"): "Orca is throwing in full stops
all over the place"
The impact? Jos?'s original problem has been swallowed.
By the time I see a hijack occur, it's too late. It's been hijacked and I
cannot undo the harm it has caused. What I do, however, is change the
subject so that someone looking at the message list summary in the list
archives will be able to see make some sense of what was being discussed.
That is, the message still appears in the original thread, but at least the
subject has been changed to indicate it is not related to the original
content.
So...the teachable thing is this: instead of doing a reply and hijacking a
thread to discuss a new issue, the preferred way would be to compose a new
message using the "New Message" feature of your e-mail client.
Will
PS - For those not familiar with message threading, take a look at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2009-August/thread.html#00209.
You will see a summary of the Orca list discussion for August 2009. The
messages are shown by a set of nested lists where the nesting indicates a
message was written as a reply to the outer list item.
Thread "openers" are the outer most list items and are the ones where
someone wrote a message directly "To:" the Orca list by using the "New
message" feature of their e-mail client.
The rest of the messages are where someone used the "Reply" button. Note
that the e-mail system is clever enough to know that you pressed the reply
button. That is, even if you change the subject to something completely
different, you won't fool the system into thinking you didn't press the
"Reply" button. So, if you're really not replying and staying on the topic
of a specific thread, don't press the "Reply" button.
Instead, write a new message using the "New Message" feature.
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:29:13 -0400
From: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
Subject: [orca-list] Repeated punctuation - bug #591724 (Re:
Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one blank space arenot
recognizedin thunderbird))
To: Paul Hunt <huntp ukonline co uk>
Cc: "David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>, orca-list gnome org
Message-ID: <4A844D69 8050006 sun com>
Content-Type: text/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Hi Paul (and all):
For the repeated punctuation problem, please refer to
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591724 and help us out by
attaching a debug.out[1] file to the bug.
Will
Paul Hunt wrote:
It makes sense to me.
Orca is announcing both the punctuation symbol that is actually in the
text and also another punctuationsymbol (the same one) that it is
inserting itself in order to give the text the correct inflection or
to insert an appropriate pause.
Obviously a bug.
On 13/08/09 17:35, David E. Price wrote:
Hi, Will,
The verbalized punctuation in Orca comes in after Orca has built up
the string to send to the synthesis engine. Thus, if Orca inserts a
'.' when building up a string, it will be verbalized if the user has
requested the relevant punctuation level.
Orca adds the '.' character to help with the prosody/pacing of
spoken output as well as the fundamental pitch contour. In this
cycle, we added the '.' character to the end of mnemonics because we
had a
complaint: without it, the pitch of the character being spoken was
incorrect and causing confusion.
I'm not sure that this is causing the problem. This issue has been
around for a while, and I notice it most when using period,
exclamation, and question marks. So, if you put in two spaces
following one of these punctuation characters, you hear the preceding
punctuation character spoken twice, such as "period period",
"exclamation exclamation" or "question question". I don't see how
that is related to adding a following apostrophe to the string.
I can't generate a debug log at the moment (the machine where I'm
currently working has gnome 2.16 and Orca 1.0), but I'll try to
generate one tonight on my laptop (gnome 2.26 and Orca from git
before the last flag day). I'll file a bug and add the debug log to it.
Thanks,
dave
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:41:18 -0400
From: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one
blank space arenot recognizedin thunderbird)
To: Paul Hunt <huntp ukonline co uk>
Cc: orca-list gnome org
Message-ID: <4A84503E 5010302 sun com>
Content-Type: text/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Hi Paul:
Paul Hunt wrote:
thanks for the hack to cut down on the full stops!
I'm a bit confused though. How does the "break speech into chunks
between pauses" checkbox fit into this?
The two things are related to having to "work the system" to deal with the
variables between speech engines. Some speech engines treat new lines
specially, some don't. Some speech engines imply that a complete utterance
(i.e., a single call to the 'speak' command) ends with a full stop, some
don't. Some speech engines treat multiple sentences in a single call to
'speak' one way, other engines treat them differently.
The result is that the same exact string being sent to different speech
engines can end up with noticeably different pauses and fundamental
contours.
The addition of '.' is obvious and that's what the PAUSE hack lets you
control.
The breaking of the speech into chunks part is one that is not so obvious.
It ends up breaking utterances into separate calls to 'speak'
rather than concatenating several sentences together in a single call.
Some speech engines handle one way well, other speech engines handle the
other way well. Changing the 'chunks' checkbox in the GUI is the preferred
way to control this, but you can also make a "LINE_BREAK" line that's
similar to the PAUSE line I mentioned in the prior e-mail to disable the
chunking.
Will
Doesn't this control whether or not Orca inserts punctuation symbols in
order to create pauses that break up what it says into logical blocks?
If so, I would expect that unchecking it would stop the additional
punctuation symbols being spoken.
However, id doesn't. So what does it do?
Paul
On 13/08/09 16:58, Willie Walker wrote:
Added as RFE http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591709 so we
don't lose track.
Willie Walker wrote:
However this isn't Thunderbird specific and indeed, Orca is throwing
in full stops all over the place with punctuation set to all. I get
them when bringing up menus, on button labels... and all over the
place where none exist.
Something wrong here...
The verbalized punctuation in Orca comes in after Orca has built up
the string to send to the synthesis engine. Thus, if Orca inserts a
'.' when building up a string, it will be verbalized if the user has
requested the relevant punctuation level.
Orca adds the '.' character to help with the prosody/pacing of spoken
output as well as the fundamental pitch contour. In this cycle, we
added the '.' character to the end of mnemonics because we had a
complaint: without it, the pitch of the character being spoken was
incorrect and causing confusion.
If you'd like, you can disable the injection of the '.' character by
adding the following lines to your ~/.orca/user-settings.py or
~/.orca/orca-customizations.py file:
import orca.speech_generator
orca.speech_generator.PAUSE = []
Depending upon your personal preferences and how your specific speech
engine behaves, you may or may not like the resulting speech.
In any case, we have a dilemma. One of the best ways to get good
prosody is to tell the speech engine where phrases start and end by
using punctuation. Verbalized punctuation is something that most
people agree should be as low in the stack as possible. At the same
time, you have introduced a suggestion that verbalized punctuation
should only apply to text from the application.
For the next cycle (i.e., 2.29.x), we could potentially try to devise
something that allows us to distinguish between the text that Orca
has generated (including punctuation) and the text that has come from
the application. We could then selectively apply the various
filters, such as verbalized punctuation, to the strings. This, of
course, assumes that the next generation speech system, which is what
Luke Yelavich at Canonical is working on, allows us to have this kind
of control.
Will
_______________________________________________
Orca-list mailing list
Orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:42:31 -0400
From: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Repeated punctuation - bug #591724 (Re:
Verbalized punctuation (was Re: more than one blank space arenot
recognizedin thunderbird))
To: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
Cc: "David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>, orca-list gnome org
Message-ID: <4A845087 90208 sun com>
Content-Type: text/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Sorry - I meant to write:
[1] - a debug.out that you captured while experiencing the problem, of
course, and preferably isolated to just the problem
Willie Walker wrote:
Hi Paul (and all):
For the repeated punctuation problem, please refer to
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591724 and help us out by
attaching a debug.out[1] file to the bug.
Will
Paul Hunt wrote:
It makes sense to me.
Orca is announcing both the punctuation symbol that is actually in the
text and also another punctuationsymbol (the same one) that it is
inserting itself in order to give the text the correct inflection or
to insert an appropriate pause.
Obviously a bug.
On 13/08/09 17:35, David E. Price wrote:
Hi, Will,
The verbalized punctuation in Orca comes in after Orca has built up
the string to send to the synthesis engine. Thus, if Orca inserts a
'.' when building up a string, it will be verbalized if the user has
requested the relevant punctuation level.
Orca adds the '.' character to help with the prosody/pacing of
spoken output as well as the fundamental pitch contour. In this
cycle, we added the '.' character to the end of mnemonics because we
had a complaint: without it, the pitch of the character being spoken
was incorrect and causing confusion.
I'm not sure that this is causing the problem. This issue has been
around for a while, and I notice it most when using period,
exclamation, and question marks. So, if you put in two spaces
following one of these punctuation characters, you hear the preceding
punctuation character spoken twice, such as "period period",
"exclamation exclamation" or "question question". I don't see how
that is related to adding a following apostrophe to the string.
I can't generate a debug log at the moment (the machine where I'm
currently working has gnome 2.16 and Orca 1.0), but I'll try to
generate one tonight on my laptop (gnome 2.26 and Orca from git
before the last flag day). I'll file a bug and add the debug log to it.
Thanks,
dave
_______________________________________________
Orca-list mailing list
Orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Orca-list mailing list
Orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
End of Orca-list Digest, Vol 43, Issue 41
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