0.11.0 rc1 beta release!

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Things seem stable, so I'm doing an RC1 release for the 0.11.0 version.
Please test intensively, since it contains the move of audio play into
the server!

Samuel

Speech Dispatcher 0.11.0
========================

Announcing the availability of Speech Dispatcher 0.11.0 developed as a part of
the Free(b)Soft project.

* What is new in 0.11.0?

- Support playing audio through the server.
- Simplify modules thanks to this.
- modules: Add support for loading from user's .local/share/speech-dispatcher.
- symbols: Process symbols.dic before emojis.dic.
- symbols: Enable speechd symbols processing by default.
- modules: Moved speech dispatcher modules to 
/usr/libexec/speech-dispatcher-modules
- (but keep compatibility with old /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules path).
- ibmtts/voxin: Improve language selection.
- ibmtts/voxin: Add option to disable punctuation commands.
- ibmtts: Fix library load.
- ibmtts: Do not build by default on other systems than 32bit PC.
- mary: Add auto-detection.
- mary: Add newer voices.
- mary: Add volume, pitch, and rate support.
- ivona: Add auto-detection.
- festival: Strip head silence.
- generic: Add DefaultVoice option.
- es_ES: Add some gender neutral rules.
- Add SPEECHD_CMD environment variable.
- modules: Rewrite main functions with BSD licence, to let proprietary modules 
easily reuse this as a basis.
- modules: Add skeletons ready for use as a basis for new modules.
- Add script to run speechd from the build tree.
- Update CLDR to version 39, symbols from NVDA and orca.
- Add Esperanto translation.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  
https://github.com/brailcom/speechd/releases/download/0.11.0-rc1/speech-dispatcher-0.11.0-rc1.tar.gz

  Debian packages will also be available in debian experimental soon.

  We recommend the use of sound icons with Speech Dispatcher.
  They are available at
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  Corresponding distribution packages should soon be available at
  your distribution mirrors.

  The home page of the project is https://github.com/brailcom/speechd

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
  synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
  synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
  of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
  is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
  to speech synthesis.

  Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

  - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
    connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
    and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

  - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers so
    that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
    synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
    and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS, Pico and others are
    supported. Festival is an advanced Free Software synthesizer
    supporting various languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual
    Free Software synthesizer.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interfaces. An Elisp
    and Java libraries are developed as sperate projects speechd-el
    and speechd-java. Possibly an interface to any other language can
    be developed.

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at https://github.com/brailcom/speechd/issues .
  For other contact please use either the above link or our mailing list
  <speechd-discuss@nongnu.org> .

Happy synthesizing!