Serial Synthesizer Support

[Steve Holmes]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 12:18:22PM +0200, Halim Sahin wrote:
> Personaly I find it really sat that blind people
> must use old hardware because of _stupid_
> additions to current linux systems which break a11y in many places.

Yes, software speech is more convenient - less hardware to haul around
or take up desk space.  I have this idea simply to give speech
dispatcher a bit more power and flexibility just incase one runs into
a situation where software speech just doesn't do it.  I know of some
people arouned here who think their hardware synths sound better and
often perform faster than software counterparts.  Until espeak came
along, frankly, I don't think there was any free speech synthesizers
out there for linux that sounded decent at all.  IBMTTS is not free
and requires ancient libraries in order to make it work  So hardware
synths aren't all bad; just too bad many of them have ceased
production.  There are a couple USB synths though the manufacturer
won't release the driver specs for the USB side, a USB to serial
device could be used.  Anyway, the serial enhancements would offer
other choices for users of speech dispatcher.

> Most of these synths are using serial communication.
> I would suggest a generic hw-synth module with individual setting files
> for each hardware synthesizer.

That does sound like an interesting approach.  Actually, I think the
generic module does that now.  In fact, I'll probably just use the
generic module but start with a speakout-generic.conf file as I own a
speakout and use the echo command as for the synth command.  Sounds
like a simple start to me.