Re: [orca-list] Built in Controls for Espeak Pretty Please with Sugar, cheeries, whatever it takes on top :)

["B. Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

I have had, and think I still do have a very open mind re this subject, and do not object at all to a 
multi-pronged  
strategy, e.g. developing a direct driver for espeak, or any other tts for that matter as well as working to 
improve 
speech-dispatcher, and if devs who know magnitudes more than I think a complete rewrite, or new piece of 
software will be 
less of a hassle to develop, and or more efficient in the long term, well that should not be taken off the 
table. 
Just a couple of things to add, basically to add to what Thomas, Hadi and others have said.

I alm an espeak user. I used it, and liked it better than eloquence for English after a short adaptation 
period. I do not 
remember if this was a few days or as long as a few weeks, but it was certainly not months, or even a month. 
The key word 
in that last sentence was English. 
I have put off working with J.D., the espeak dev to try and improve the other language I use a lot, Spanish. 
I am not sure 
however if we can actually achieve good enough results any time soon, and maybe not ever to satisfy me. I'll 
never know 
until I do what ever I can to help in this project, but even if things succeed beyond my most optimistic 
thoughtts espeak, 
the ibmtts, dectalk or what ever syntyh will not do it for everyone. For the record the ibmtts  Spanish voice 
is very good 
iin my and many native speakers' opinions, and svox-pico is not bad at all as far as over all tone and accent 
goes for 
Spanish or French, and I do not like these vvoices that much for English. They too have their limitations, 
especially at 
high speeds., 
OK, going off topic with my short reviews of the voices there, but the point is yes, for a number of reasons 
we do need a 
quality voice for as many languages as possible, and it is certainly valuable to have an api that can be used 
by programs 
other than orca. 
For my first years using Linux I mostly used speechd-up for working with espeak, but for a number of reasons 
I'm using 
espeakup not only on cli only systems, but now also on arch with a GUI, and may well have to go a sinmilar 
route on Ubuntu 
and other Debian based distros. I do not particularly like having to use the separate bridge between synths 
and my other 
screenreader, and espeakup is for espeak only, so again a limitatioin. 
I think those who are in a position to do actual coding and or analize based on knowledge need to have the 
conversation 
and try and alocate limited resources in the most efficient manner possible. 
Of course in open source projects, one does what one wants mostly, and only sometimes can be influenced to do 
something 
more or different to satisfy a group goal, but I would encourage people to try hard to work together and come 
to as close 
to consensus as possible. Beyond that, if you can't stand the near consensus opinion and goal(s), by all 
means do what 
ever you can do well enough to help yourself and others. I just don't want to see say a speechdispatcher 
alternative get 
just enough support to get a project started, but not get it to a viable point, or not get it working better 
than 
speechdispatcher while others are giviing just enough to speechdispatcher to keep it alive but not markedly 
improve the 
pace of improvement. Our resources seem pretty few to be fragmenting efforts. 
Just some thoughts, based on little concrete information as to coding posibilities, but based more on 
observing how 
fragmentation works and does not work in other projects. 
If we had the dev base that open/libre offices have that would be one thing, but in our case I'm asking if 
there's the man 
and woman power to see quick progress on multiple projects, and if so, why hae we not seen progress on what 
projects we 
already have?
As for Orca priorities I am very impressed with how our fearless leader and the other folks who contribute to 
orca have 
set priorties since I've been aware of orca. 
I thank all the ppl who've worked on orca, Luke and anyoone else who's worked on speechdispatcher, which does 
generally 
work well for me in spite of some serious problems, Fred and others who are working on QT, and all who work 
on 
accessibility at Mozila GTK devs, at-spi, and others I do not know ab out or do not remember right now.  A 
lot has been 
done right, but so much more needs to be done. Keep the faith!
--
B.H.
 
 
On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 11:11:46AM +0430, Hadi Rezaee wrote:
> I just wanted to send a mail and  Upvote what thomas said
> I have purchaced voxin because I really can't go along with espeak, and it
> is extremely terrible when reading package names.
> I'm just a new user to linux, but just wanted to mention that the
> punctuation thingy is badly broken with elequence and orca.
>
> On 8/29/2014 11:06 AM, Thomas Ward wrote:
> > 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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