Speech-dispatcher: do any modules/backends support playing sound-icons ?

[Luke Yelavich]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 12:18:50PM AEST, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 04:36:46AM AEST, Sander Eikelenboom wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > I'm trying out speech-dispatcher and the python module for a project.
> > Speech works great, but i'm struggling to to get the "sound-icons" to work.
> > The documentation is rather sparse :-(
> 
> I can reproduce here. I tried your script in your latter post. I then tried 
> using the espeak command-line client to play a sound icon, and that worked, 
> so something is being lost in translation somewhere along the line.

Ok, I have found the cause.

TO manage espeak's audio output, Speech Dispatcher uses espeak in audio 
retrieval mode. According to the API, this requires that the calling program 
handle the playing of any audio elements specified in the SSML audio tag. The 
issue here is that Speech Dispatcher uses libsndfile to play audio files, 
however as it currently stands, libsndfile is an optional dependency, and as a 
result, Speech Dispatcher is not built against it, likely in most distros.

In the case of espeak, if sndfile is not found, then espeak speaks the name of 
the sound icon, which is of course confusing to the user.

The solution here is to bump libsndfile to a mandetory dependency of Speech 
Dispatcher to make sure sound icons are usable.

Luke