Re: [orca-list] PulseAudio (was Re: orca speech uncontrolled and jumbled with speech-dispatcher)

[Mike Gorse <mgorse alum wpi edu>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Luke Yelavich wrote:

> The one speech synthesizer that works with speech-dispatcher, and that does not break up when being used via 
> pulseaudio, is flite. Flite doesn't have anything in its API that requires an audio buffer to be set, however 
> as we all know, flite is not the most pleasant to listen to, and is not the most responsive of speech 
> synthesizers.

What do you mean about it not being the most responsive of speech 
synthesizers?  Does it take longer than other synthesizers to generate 
samples, or do you mean something else?  It does tend to generate padding 
at the beginning and end of a sample which can be stripped, and SD's 
driver did not do this the last time I looked (which was years ago).

> As for speech-dispatcher and orca in Ubuntu karmic, if one was to use the screen reader accessibility profile 
> to install Ubuntu, pulseaudio will be disabled system wide, allowing speech-dispatcher to work via alsa. As 
> for the espeak crashing issue, the actual problem has not yet been found, but I do have a work-around in 
> mind, which I hope to code in the next week. The work-around in question will cause the sd_espeak driver to 
> be restarted should it crash.

Wouldn't surprise me if it is calling ALSA functions on multiple threads 
in a way that isn't safe (eflite has that issue, although, come to think 
of it, it hasn't rashed much if at all since I updated to OpenSUSE 11.2, 
so perhaps there have been some ALSA changes that improve things.  It'll 
be interesting to see if the SD crashes continue.)  I'm just guessing, 
anyway--haven't looked at the code.