Excellent points, Brian. There is one more point to be made - a software synthesizer is not only demanding of memory but of CPU power. That means if speakup relied on a software synthesizer it would not run on minimum systems, and there is a lot of need for minimum systems to be accessible, IMHO. Ch;uck On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Brian Borowski wrote: > There's been a thread about speakup and ViaVoice and writing the code to > make this work. I wanted to point out a few things about this idea, that > are going to have to be worked out. > > * ViaVoice is a software synthesizer and the kernel has to be running, > and most of the other parts of linux have to be operational before > anything can be done with a software synthesizer, unless it gets totally > built into the kernel; that could make a kernel huge, and would also > require that sound card stuff (there are very many sound cards out there), > be loaded into the kernel as well. > > * You would miss the real-time boot-up stuff from the kernel, a very > important feature, in my opinion, especially when trying to figure out > what is going on when something is not working as it should be, or when > you're trying to build a kernel and something isn't quite working write. > You could make use of the kernel message buffer to have the software > synthesizer speak the startup messages after the fact, but if there was a > failure during bootup; you would never get the opportunity to hear > anything at all, because you'd never get the speech started up. > > * Then, finally, there's another thing, the kernel is open source, > speakup is open source, the information is available for the software > synthesizer API, and perhaps, with some imagination, someone can figure > out a solution for the above two points. If someone really wants this > badly enough, why can't they put some effort into coding for this project. > > There's more than enough work with the normal speakup development to keep > a few Kirks busy, without even worrying about ViaVoice, so I suspect, that > this is one of those projects that someone else will have to do. If > there's no one else to do it; it probably won't get done for a very long > time. > > Brian Borowski > > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh The reverse side also has a reverse side. -- Japanese proverb
