Re: [orca-list] Is anyone using Orca with Emacspeak? And does speech-dispatcher support hardware synths?

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello Joanie,
Unfortunately I think due to what software synthesis is it cannot 
replace hardware synthesisers. Software synthesis requires working 
sound, which on Linux at times seems very hard to achieve (particularly 
once pulseaudio gets involved). Admittedly normally Linux can be 
rescued/fixed from a Live CD such as GRML, however there are some sound 
cards where the volume just doesn't seem to be raised to a suitable 
level by the LiveCD. Even on windows, which is more strongly lead in one 
direction, there are occasions where working sound may not be there (eg. 
in safe mode, at least with windows XP and before, don't know about 
newer, or in the event one is doing a fresh install and may not have 
installed the sound driver). The only OS I think I would be prepared to 
say one would not hit an event where one needs a hardware synth or a 
working pair of eyes, is MacOSX. Apple probably have an advantage here 
as MacOSX is only supported with Apple computers and so a very limited 
set of hardware, so they can be a lot more certain of having working audio.

May be others feel the quality of the voices in software synths isn't so 
good, viavoice is good enough for me ( I wish though it was updated so 
it was a bit better with modern distros and may be some improvements in 
the speech-dispatcher driver could be made). Also sometimes 
responsiveness of software synths is cited as an issue, well again 
viavoice isn't bad in that respect in my mind and neither is espeak.

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/37 20:59, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> Hey again Tomas, all.
>
> > I'd rather put it this way: We don't want to put OUR effort into developing output
> > modules for hardware synthesizers
> Having pondered this some more.... I think I was asking the wrong
> question before. The right question perhaps is instead: What would it
> take to get speech-dispatcher to such a high degree of awesomeness that
> no one would even consider using a hardware synthesizer? Is it work that
> needs to be done in speech-dispatcher itself, or in espeak, or someplace
> else? And is anyone doing it?
>
> Take care.
> --joanie