Re: [orca-list] Anybody using DECtalk (hardware or software) with Orca

["David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>]

Hi,

On 04/13/2010 05:58 PM, Alex H. wrote:
> Hi listers,
>
> I am eventually thinking on buying a hardware DECTalk USB or the
> software synth. I've heard the USB sounds better and more like the
> great sounding 4.3. Can anybody comment on using DECtalk with Orca,
> what it took to get it set up etc? How is responsiveness and so on?
>
> I haven't tried it for a while, but I have an old DECTalk serial port synthesizer. To use it with Orca, you 
> need to have the emacspeak speech servers installed on your system. As I recall, it worked very well with 
> Orca. If emacspeak was installed when you installed/built Orca, the emacspeak speech server was automatically 
> included in the speech servers list in Orca.
Under the speech tab in Orca Preferences, you can just choose the 
emacspeak speech server from the list, then the DECTalk from the voices 
list.

> However, my memory is that it got a little squirrely if you used it with Orca under gnome and emacspeak 
> running in a console. Things would lock up if you tried to use emacspeak from within gnome when Orca was 
> running. So, I use my DECTalk with emacspeak in a console and a number of different software synthesizers 
> with Orca.
>    

Good luck,

dave