punctuation spoken with a pause and echo

[Jonathan Duddington]

> When I switch Orca from gnome-speech to speech-dispatcher the
> punctuation gets spoken with a noticeable pause before and after and
>an echoing sound.

That's probably eSpeak.  When asked to speak the names of punctuation
characters, it applies a small echo, in order to distinguish the names
of punctuation characters from words in the text.  Some people think
this is a good idea, some don't.

> The pause is a real problem, as it makes everything sluggish. 
> Is there a way to avoid this? Is it a pulseaudio problem? 

I've looked at this and I found that eSpeak was adding extra pauses
where it should not.  I have fixed this now in eSpeak version 1.40.06,
which is available at:
http://espeak.sf.net/test/latest.html

> PS: I've also noticed that, although I use espeak with both speech
> systems, the names for the punctuation change.

I think one system (probably Gnome-speech) translates punctuation
characters to names before calling eSpeak, whereas Speech-dispatcher
asks eSpeak to do the conversion.

Different people have different views on the best names for characters.
 The eSpeak "en" voice says "stroke", but the "en-us" voice says
"slash" (which Americans seem to prefer).

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