Setting the DefaultVoice for a voice without a conf file

[Didier Spaier]

Dear Olga and all,

On 29/11/2018 07:10, Olga Yakovleva wrote:
> Looking at the logs, when I ask Orca to use the default voice, it
> still sets the synthesis voice name.

I does that only if you have already set the synthesis voice (the Person
on Orca parlance) among its preferences.
Else it just requests from the default synthesizer, or from the
synthesizer set among its preferences, a voice in the language extracted
from $LANG or $LC_MESSAGES.

For instance here I have usually LANG=fr_FR.utf8, so Orca request a
French voice. If I have LANG=en_US.utf8 it requests an English voice.

This request is transmitted to the synthesizer by Spech Dispatcher, 
which will choose the synthesis voiec to use in that case (i.e., if a
specific synthesis voice was nor requested by the client)

As an example I have set as default the synthesizer flite-generic in
/etc/speechd.conf. It's not officially supported but I know that
it doesn't have a voice for lang=fr. and I was curious to see what will
happen then.

After reboot and startx I was greeted in the desktop by an English voice.

It is flite that chose an English voice to speak, as the command to speak
the greeting message (French for "Screen reader on") was:
flite -voice /usr/share/flite/voices/no_voice --setf duration_stretch=1.00 
--setf int_f0_target_mean=100.00 -t 'Lecteur d??cran activ?.'

So, if the synthesis voice is set neither by the client nor by
Speech Dispatcher, choosing one is up to the synthesizer. Actually by
its developer, aka Olga for RHVoice ;)

By the way I will build RHVoice for Slint and let you know the outcome.

> On my machine the name is the translation of the word voice into
> Russian. The voice type is not set. When I run spd-say, it uses the
> default voice type from speechd.conf and doesn't set the synthesis
> voice.

It doesn't, unless you give the synthesizer name as argument of the
-y option in the spd-say command. In that respect it behaves like Orca.
As a reminder, "spd-say -O" lists all available synthesizers and
"spd-say -o <synthesizer name> -L" lists all available synthesis voices
for this <synthesizer name>.  

Best,

Didier