Re: [orca-list] OT, espeak has been forked

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,

I would say let's people pick what they like. I still hope Jonathan 
Duddinkton will be able to merge some of the fixes to the original 
eSpeak at a later time.
I am sure  there is significant number of improvements already. e.g. 
there are loads of coverity and memory management related fixes, 
language data updates i.e. pronounciation dictionaries phonemes and more 
for american english, italian, french and perhaps even more, the 
additional language data for russian, cantonese and mandarin are bundled 
with eSpeak by default now, there are also build system related tweaks 
and cosmetic fixes. Big feature that's being implemented is better SSML 
support which will recognize many more SSML tags and compilation of 
language data as you have already pointed out. For the people happy to 
live on the bleeding edge like you and me and perhaps a few others this 
is great deal of changes.
It is however nice to point out that not all of these changes are brand 
new. Auto tools support has been already introduced years ago and it has 
not been accepted into so called upstream eSpeak released by Jonathan 
Duddington.

I think we need to wait until eSpeak NG evolves a bit more.

Still I would say if you like eSpeak and you can build it then test it 
out and submit your tweaks, bug reports whatever you have to say.

Greetings

Peter

On 15.12.2015 at 17:58 kendell clark wrote:
> hi all
> As some of you may or may not know, about a week or two ago, espeak 
> was forked into a new project, called espeak-ng, for next generation. 
> Reece dunn, the developer of espeak for android, has done this 
> primarily because multiple people have tried reaching jonathan 
> duddington, the main developer and have  failed. Some have gone so far 
> as to get his address in the UK, and his phone number, both of which 
> no longer work. The conclusion is either that he is dead or no longer 
> active, so espeak was forked. I'm writing this mainly because it looks 
> like the upstream espeak from which espeak ng was forked from might 
> not see much development. There have already been a ton of changes 
> done to espeak ng that aren't in espeak, including the complete 
> removal of espeak edit, the gui program needed to compile the phoneme 
> data. This has been murged into the espeak program itself, so you can 
> now do espeak --compile-phonemes and espeak --compile-intonations 
> instead of having to use a clunky gui that has never been accessible 
> on linux. A QT gui is planned that will make it easier to manage this 
> stuff but it hasn't been written. I'm also wondering if  we should 
> switch over to this fork? And by we I mean all the major linux 
> distributions. Ubuntu, vinux, sonar, arch, fedora, etc? I've already 
> got reece dunn merging my fixes into espeak periodically, just like he 
> does with the italian fixes, and jamie and mic from nvda have already 
> switched over or are planning to.
> Espeak ng should work out of the box with speech-dispatcher as far as 
> I know. I've not successfully built it yet, because it's still wildly 
> in a state of flux, but it should work. We might need to modify the 
> espeak speech-dispatcher module but I doubt it. Honestly that module 
> needs an overhall anyway, but it isn't necessary I don't believe, 
> since the espeak API hasn't changed much, only been added to to allow 
> the compilation of phonemes and intonation data. The only thing that 
> might, maybe, be necessary is a tweak to say espeak (next generation) 
> or something to differentiate it from espeak. The main differences 
> between espeak and espeak ng are probably not of much interest to most 
> people, other than that you can now do the standard ./configure, make, 
> make install steps to compile it, which the upstream espeak couldn't do.
> THoughts?
>
> Kendell clark
>
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