[orca-list] Speech Dispatcher 0.7 Released

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

Speech Dispatcher 0.7 Released
==============================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of
Speech Dispatcher 0.7 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project. Please read `NOTES' bellow.

* What is new in 0.7?

 * Speech Dispatcher uses UNIX style sockets as default means
   of communication, thus avoiding the necessity to choose a numeric
   port and greatly easying session integration and adressing several
   security issues

 * Autospawn -- server is started automatically when a client requests it
   It can be forbidden in the appropriate server configuration file
   (thanks to Luke Yelavich)

 * Pulse Audio output reworked and fixed (thanks to Rui Batista)

 * Dispatcher runs as user service (not system service) by default
   and doesn't require the previous presence of ~/.speech-dispatcher
   directory

 * Graceful audio fallback (e.g. if pulse is not working, use Alsa...)
   (thanks to Luke Yelavich)

 * Various bugfixes and fine-tunnings

 * Updated documentation

NOTES for packagers: The communication mechanism of Speech Dispatcher
and the way of starting it has been severely reworked in this release.
Some ./configure variables as PIDPATH are no longer relevant. It is highly
recommended to start Speech Dispatcher per-user in his user session
and avoid starting it as a system service via /etc/init.d/. Please check
the updated documentation, especially the part Technical Specification.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.7.tar.gz

  We recommend you to fetch the sound icons for use with Speech Dispatcher.
  They are available at
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  Corresponding Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu packages will soon be 
available at
  your distribution mirrors.

  The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
  synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
  synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
  of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
  is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
  to speech synthesis.

  Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

  - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
    connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
    and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

  - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers
    so that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
    synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
    and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS are supported. Festival
    is an advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting various languages.
    Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual synthesizer.

  - Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
    settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interface. An Elisp 
library
    is developed as a sperate project speechd-el. Possibly an interface
    to any other language can be developed.

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at <speechd- bugs@lists.freebsoft.org>. For other
  contact please use <speechd lists freebsoft org>


Best Regards,
Brailcom, o.p.s.
http://www.brailcom.org