Re: [orca-list] You all're gonna think I'm stupid, but, I need help with Gnome-Speech

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Alex,

Actually, speech-dispatcher does support Dectalk Access, the Cepstral 
voices, and the Ivona voices through conf scripts so in actuality you 
aren't missing much by not using gnome-speech. I've found it to be 
fairly comparable in features, and supports about the same text to 
speech engines. Here is a list of commercial engines I have gotten to 
work with speech dispatcher.

Eloquence using Voxin
Cepstral Swift voices using Cepstral conf file
Dectalk Access 5 using Dectalk conf file
Ivona Text to Speech using Ivona conf file

That's not including the free speech engines like ESpeak, Festival, and 
FreeTTS. So in terms of supporting comercial and free voices 
speech-dispatcher and gnome-speech are about the same.

As far as hardware synth drivers either I missed something or you are 
mistaken but gnome-speech never supported hardware synths. Most people 
who use hardware synths with Orca usually fell back on the old Emacspeak 
drivers. At least that is my understanding of hardware speech and Orca.

In any case one thing I know for certain the Nuance Realspeak voices and 
Acapella voices were neverported to Linux so naturally gnome-speech 
never supported them in the first place.  Your saying that gnome-speech 
did is incorrect.

As for why speech-dispatcher replaced gnome-speech there are a number of 
reasons for why that decision was made, and it had nothing to do with 
the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" philosophy. As has been stated 
before when Gnome was upgraded from 2.x to 3.x Corba, one of the 
components gnome-speech uses, was deprecated. To upgrade gnome-speech to 
Gnome 3 would require a major update where simply switching over to 
speech-dispatcher was a far easier and more realistic goal. Plus as I 
have pointed out above speech-dispatcher now supports a number of 
commercial speech engines, all be it through special configuration 
files, and its actually much easier than gnome-speech to upgrade and add 
additional speech drivers to. Plus speech-dispatcher isn't tied to any 
specific desktop or application so it can be used independently by any 
speech enabled application regardless of desktop environment etc. So 
that's why.

Cheers!

On 5/1/2012 1:35 PM, Alex Midence wrote:
> I've always wondered why they haul off and fix what isn't broken.  Why
> was Gnome speech deprecated?  I don't believe speech dispatcher
> supports nearly as much stuff as gnome speech did:  Hardware speech
> synthesizers, commercial speech synthesizers like dectalk, nuance and
> acapella and on and on and on.
>
> Alex M