Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

Re-sending to the Orca list, forgot to reply to all.

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 09:16:28AM AEST, kendell clark wrote:
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> hi
> Myself, I think this could be partially solved by implementing proper
> varient support for speech-dispatcher's espeak module. The nvda espeak
> driver does this, but it does it, I believe, by having it's own
> special copy of espeak, and this would be all kinds of inconvenient to
> deal with, so if this is done, It should probably either be done by
> interfacing with libespeak, or somehow communicating with the espeak
> code itself via system calls.

Speech Dispatcher's espeak driver already uses libespeak to do all speech synthesis. I think at the time the 
espeak driver was developed, Espeak didn't have variants. It also doesn't help that Speech Dispatcher has the 
concept of variants, but in Speech Dispatcher terms, variants referrs to languages.

Espeak also doesn't seem to list its variants in its voice list output, either via Speech Dispatcher or the 
espeak command-line utility. So perhaps espeak does need to be extended to make its variants available via 
the same way other voices are listed and used.
 
> The difference is that sapi on windows doesn't have drivers for
> each individual synth. 

Actually, yes they would. Driver is a generic term that refers to code that allows one piece of software or 
hardware to work with the rest of a system, in this case a speech synth, working with applications that use 
the sAPI interface.

Luke