Hi Folks: I think this is a very interresting topic so I figured I should write in with my views and philosophies about the way speakup is and will go for the foreseeable future. First of all Via Voice. It is currently not my intent to pay any attemtion to it as a speakup synthesizer. Maybe sometime off in the distant future but not now. If I am going to work towards a software synth and I have been all along, it will be tuxTalk, was rsynth. It is not that I have any particular problem with a commercial product but that with out source it is almost impossible to retro fit them. I have looked closely at festival and mbrolla as well but memory whise they are pigs. Once again sometime in the distant future I may take another look at them to see if either festival can be trimmed down or Mbrolla might have gone public. For now though, it is TuxTalk and that's it. I am working toward making speakup work with synth drivers as modules. It is not close yet mostly to do with the amount of bug fixes and other features people want. Speakup will always be able to have the particular synth driver built-in so that people will not lose access to the boot messages if they have a synth such as an internal or external synth. The point isn't whether you listen to the boot messages or not, most of us hit the keypad enter to shut off the boot speech. The point is that you can, and if something goes wrong during the boot process you have the ability to review back through those messages to see what went wrong, instead of depending on some sighty to come over sometime to give you a hand. There are many many features which people have asked for and which I'd like to include in speakup. The current situation is that I am almost the only person doing development work. We are slowly getting a community of other technical developers such as Jim Danley and Matt Campbell, but they have not been involved long enough to have a significant affect on the pile, in techie talk heap, of work which still needs to be done. Until we get to that point making large changes won't happen quickly. We have been working on a /dev/synth device which allows programs like emacspeak to talk to the synth through speakup. There are already a number of people using this interface to varying degrees of success. The interface is not complete but it is slowly coming along. I've run out of things to say. At least Temporarily! 'grin' As far as Via Voice goes, let me re-iterate, don't hold your breath it isn't even on the list, which is long. Kirk -- Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario phone: (519) 661-3061
