Speech Dispatcher backend

[Hynek Hanke]

Peter Parente p????e v P?? 30. 06. 2006 v 12:22 -0400:
> I noticed you created a Speech Dispatcher backend for Orca. I'd like
> to do the same for IBM's Linux Screen Reader. 

Hi Peter,

thanks for your interest.

> Do you know if the support for sound icons in Speech Dispatcher is
> currently implemented? 

Yes, what is described in the documentation on
http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/speechd/ssip_8.html#SEC8
is fully implemented.

However...

> LSR does currently support audio icons and can play them using a
> different mixer/output library. I was wondering if I would be able to
> test the same functionality with Speech Dispatcher. 

...we take a little bit different approach. In Speech Dispatcher, sound
icons are viewed as events and they are passed to the output driver and
finally the synthesis engine as symbolic names. The engine decides
(ideally based on user configuration) what to do with the event. In a
situation when one user might like playing a .wav file, another user
might prefer to have some text spoken, or speak text and then play a wav
file etc. This is currently fully supported only in Festival and IBM
TTS, other engines will at leat say the icon name in voice. As for audio
output, we try to get audio samples back from the synthesizer and play
them using our own modules (currently OSS, Alsa, NAS), but again, this
is not possible for all synthesizers.

Also if you are looking into the future, our plan with TTS API (see
http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api ) is to provide emulation for such
capabilities in the above layer so that if a synthesizer won't support
sound icons, a helper module can emulate them to some degree (for any
synthesizer). Next release of Speech Dispatcher is going to use
TTS API as its backend. Actually TTS API Provider can partly be seen as
a way to refactor Speech Dispatcher into two components.

I hope this helps.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke

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