Please wait before releasing 0.9, more voices available soon.

[Didier Spaier]

Hello,

On 25/11/2018 18:53, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Well, it is interesting to include support for more flite voices, but
> the generic.conf way poses a lot of problems: speech-dispatcher can't
> control the audio output, can't support indexing, can't set the volume,
> needs to explicitly list all potential voices in the generic.conf file
> with all attributes (language, male/female, etc.), etc. etc.  It's thus
> *way* more interesting to extend flite.c to support listing the voices
> available in /usr/share/flite/ than introducing another way to use
> flite, which may even confuse users.

Well, I disagree.
A specific module can technically better, however I am not convinced
that makes a big difference for the end user, running Orca for instance.

A user who does get an audio output won't most often care what app is
providing it, won't be bothered by the lack of indexing (or does that
manifest?) and have other ways to increase or decrease the volume.

Listing all potential voices in the generic.conf file is only to be done
once (I did already for both espeak-ng-mbrola-generic.conf and
flite-generic.conf). Yes there can be a maintenance issue but new
voices are not provided frequently.

Yes extending flite.c to support listing the voices available in
/usr/share/flite woudl be better, but who will do it and when? Do we
have to wait to provide more voices?

Introducing an other way to use flite can only confuse the user if
speechd.conf is not set by the package or distribution maintainer to
avoid that: there is no point enabling flite if flite-generic is enabled
IMO.

But this is not the only case: if we want to limit these confusions
better get rid of generic.conf files that provide zero added value, like
pico-generic.conf and espeak-generic.conf (I'd tend to also remove
espeak.conf and espeak-mbrola-generic.conf in future releases but I
understand that not all users will replace espeak with espeak-ng soon).

> As mentioned previously, you shouldn't need that with 0.9 RC2. If you
> still have issues with RC2, please provide more details. At any rate,
> this is not a proper fix since putting a space there is not without
> consequences.

I confirm: that's not needed any more, I was wrong.

Incidentally other files have a space between double quotes:
didier[/data/GitHub/speechd/config/modules]$ grep ^GenericPunctNone *
espeak-generic.conf:GenericPunctNone ""
espeak-mbrola-generic.conf:GenericPunctNone " "
espeak-ng-mbrola-generic.conf:GenericPunctNone " "
mary-generic.conf:GenericPunctNone " "
pico-generic.conf:GenericPunctNone " "
didier[/data/GitHub/speechd/config/modules]$

Best,

Didier