Re: [orca-list] Announcing Speech Switch: making Linux a hospitable place for TTS engines like Voxin

[Didier Spaier <didier slint fr>]

Hi Bill,

I maintain the Slint accessible distribution and tend to agree with 
Samuel's answer.

Currently for desktop users we ship these synthesizers:
espeak-ng
espeak-ng-mbrola-generic
flite
flite-generic (unofficial custom config file).
pico
pico-generic
rhvoice

I won't ship in Slint a software that doesn't bring at least the
same features as speech-dispatcher.

voxin (version 3.3rc1) is compatible with our version of speech-dispatcher.

Yes there is a lot of contributions to speech-dispatcher that could be 
way more useful that providing an alternative. Providing modules for
TTS engines not yet supported and re-writing spd-conf come to mind,
among others.

Best regards,

Didier

On 02/12/2020 17:27, Bill Cox via orca-list wrote:
> Source code for the TTS modules is already available on Github 
> <https://github.com/waywardgeek/speechswitch>.  The full system will  be 
> running by January 1, and will be an alternative to Speech Dispatcher.
>
> I would like to thank the Voxin and Orca authors for all their efforts 
> over the years.  I rely heavily on both of these tools to remain 
> productive at work.
>
> Voxin broke again for me on Monday after a Linux update was pushed to my 
> corporate laptop.  This is not the fault of the Voxin authors!  They do 
> this work out of charity, knowing that blind and low vision folks around 
> the world rely on their efforts.  The problem is the architecture of 
> Speech Dispatcher, which is hostile to commercial TTS engines.  I will 
> this with Speech Switch.
>
> In the future, any Linux user, blind or sighted, will be able to easily 
> install Voxin and likely several other commercial TTS engines.  You'll 
> be able to buy a TTS license once, and use that same binary installer on 
> any Linux distro, for years to come.  Updates to your Linux installation 
> will no longer break the connection to your favorite TTS engine, so long 
> as your distro tests that Orca works with Espeak as part of their 
> release process.  This is my promise with Speech Switch.
>
> Speech Switch currently supports Voxin, Espea, and PicoTTS.  Over the 
> next few days, I am going to write the initial version of Speech 
> Switch's command interpreter for SSIP, which is the command language 
> used by Speech Dispatcher.  By January, you will be able to replace 
> /usr/bin/speech-dispatcher with a symbolic link to 
> /usr/bin/speechswitch, and everything should just work.
>
> I could use help from volunte who would like to contribute!  In 
> particular, I'd like some help writing a new Python library to allow 
> Orca users to select either Speech Dispatcher or Speech Switch.  
> Replacing /usr/speeech-dispatcher with a symlink to /usr/speechswitch is 
> just a temporary hack.  Writing wrappers for other TTS engines would 
> also be appreciated.  I've tried to make writing a TTS backend module as 
> simple as possible, and I link only to libc, so your compiled modules 
> should port across distros.  I also could use help from testers on 
> various Linux distros.
>
> If you're interested, send me an email to waywardgeek gmail com 
> <mailto:waywardgeek gmail com>
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
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