As some of you use speechd-up along with Speech Dispatcher to interface
Speakup to software synthesis, I think you might be interested in the
following announce.
Speech Dispatcher 0.4 released
==============================
The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the release
of Speech Dispatcher 0.4 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project.
* 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.
The architecture of Speech Dispatcher is based on a proven
client/server model. The basic means of client communication
with Speech Dispatcher is through a TCP connection using the Speech
Synthesis Interface Protocol (SSIP).
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 and
(non-free) Dectalk software are supported.
- Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.
- Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
shared library and a Common Lisp interface. The
Python interface is being worked on. An Elisp library is
developed as a sperate project speechd-el. Possibly an interface
to any other language can be developed.
* What is new in 0.4?
- Flite output is now installed with the 16-bit voice, if available.
- The generic output module can now also set volume.
- spd-say is now rewritten to accept the most important speech
parameters and thus provide a simple but useful Speech Dispatcher
client. Documentation is provided in info.
- The C/C++ shared library interface now uses TCP_NODELAY to prevent
timeouts and make the communication faster.
- Bugfixes.
* Where to get it?
You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.4.tar.gz .
We recommend you to fetch the sound icons Speech Dispatcher can use as
well. They are available at
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz
Corresponding Debian packages are or soon will be available at your
Debian distribution mirror. (We would highly appreciate any help
with RPM distribution!)
The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd .
* How to report bugs?
Please report bugs at <speechd at bugs.freebsoft.org>. For other
contact please use <speechd at freebsoft.org>
Happy synthesizing!
Hynek Hanke
