Storm,
The shortcomings of Speech Dispatcher are well known to me. For what
its worth I am a software developer and an end user, and I empathize
with your and others frustrations with the current technology. In
many ways I have similar frustrations with Speech Dispatcher but for
slightly differing reasons.
Unlike some on this list I don't exclusively rely upon free software
like Espeak. I have purchased a number of commercial text to speech
systems like Dectalk, Eloquence, and Cepstral, and am just as
disappointed with Speech Dispatcher's lackluster support for them as
I am with its support for Espeak. After all, I might even have more
of a reason to gripe since I paid money for what were supposedly
better quality text to speech systems, but am getting lackluster
results because there is a definite and obvious difference in
performance with the way Orca did with those synthesizers using Gnome
Speech and the performance Orca has with using Speech dispatcher. Its
clearly a case of Speech Dispatcher being a less desirable solution
for handling speech drivers.
The point here is this. So far I have heard a few suggestions of
adding direct support for Espeak in Orca. Basically, writing a Espeak
module that gives Orca direct control over the TTS output.
While I see where people are going with this I see two major problems
with it.
First, adding Espeak support to Orca assumes everyone uses Espeak,
and only benefits Espeak users. Anyone who happens to use something
like a commercial speech solution like Cepstral Dianne or a free
speech solution like Festival still get shorted. The developer
resolves the problem with Orca and Espeak, which is fine if one
happens to be using Espeak, but does nothing for the rest of us who
may have other preferences.
Therefore unless we are looking into the option of supporting every
speech system directly by Orca I am not in favor of supporting Espeak
directly. Its a lot of work that only supports a single text to
speech system, and there is a more effective way of fixing the
problems with Espeak without resorting to direct Espeak support.
Writing a better alternative to Speech Dispatcher may be such a
solution, and not only resolve problems with Espeak but might offer
improvements for Eloquence, Festival, Cepstral, etc as well.
Second, adding Espeak support to Orca only helps Orca. This does not
offer a means of offering improved text to speech support to other
applications and games. If we think about Orca and only Orca
accessibility we may in fact be shortchanging ourselves in the long
run by excluding more long term accessibility solutions.
For example, as many of you may know Microsoft Windows offers a
speech API, Sapi, which is available to any and all applications.
It is used by screen readers like Jaws, NVDA, and Window-Eyes for
traditional screen reader speech output, but is by no means limited
in scope to screen readers. Jim Kitchen, a popular author of
accessible audio games, has used Sapi to speak various things in his
games. Nextup has a number of speech enabled applications like
TextAloud, WeatherAloud, and NewsAloud that speaks the weather, news,
and various other things aloud via Sapi voices.
Microsoft has a map program that speaks driving or walking directions
aloud as well. My point being that text to speech support has many
applications besides screen readers and we should not shortchange
ourselves by focusing exclusively on Orca, and ignoring the bigger
picture here.
Yes, Speech Dispatcher has problems, and here is an opportunity to
address that issue. Rather than including support directly into Orca
I think what we need to do is replace Speech Dispatcher with a more
stable, more reliable, API for text to speech that does everything
Sapi does for Windows users. Yeah, we can use it in Orca for speech
output, but consider developing something that can be used in talking
weather applications, news applications, e-book readers, whatever.
Plus offer support for as many free and commercial speech engines are
out there so that the user can use what he or she wants to use rather
than limiting ourselves to one and only one text to speech system.
I know, for example, I read a lot of books. Quite a number of them
are e-books. However, when reading books I find Espeak gets on my
nerves. Espeak is alright for day to day tasks like checking mail,
writing code, or something like that but not really for reading a
good book. For that I switch over to one of the Cepstral voices which
is more human sounding, more realistic, and is the reason I was
willing to put a little money out for some higher quality voices for
Linux. Therefore if I took time out of my day to write such a speech
system I'd want to be able to be able to choose which text to speech
system I want for specific situations than exclusively devoting all
my effort into one text to speech system which I tolerate more than
like.
So to sum up my thoughts let's consider expanding this support a bit,
not focus so much on including Espeak support into Orca, and see what
we can do to come up with a better alternative to speech Dispatcher
rather than putting all or eggs in one basket with Orca and Espeak.
On 8/27/14, Storm Dragon <stormdragon2976 gmail com> wrote:
Howdy, Nearly every other screen reader has multiple ways to
interact with speech. NVDA has a built in espeak, and the other
nonfree readers have synths as well, I think most have a built in
Eloquence. Never once, have I heard any of those users complain that
their screen reader has entirely too many ways to talk. Also, as far
as I am aware, no one has ever said "Man, I really wish my screen
reader had to jump through layer after layer of junk to speak."
Speech-dispatcher is ok, for minimal usage, but it crashes with
alsa, has odd puctuation inconsistancies, and is slow as molasses.
The last time development of speech-dispatcher even reached a
snail's pace was when open-speech or whatever was called was made
because people weree frustrated with the lack of progress made by
speech-dispatcher. I'm not even asking to replace spd. Let the
people who like it use it. That's one thing that makes Linux rock,
there's usually more than one way to do things. for some people,
speech-dispatcher may be fine. for me, it's falling rather short.
Also, with a reliable way to deliver speech, speech-dispatcher can
drag on it its currently abysmally slow progress, and we can have
fully working espeak.
Speech-dispatcher has been around and for a long time now, and there
still not full support for espeak... No way to use variants, and you
have to hack it to use freasonably fast espeak. Thanks Storm
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