As I did most of the writing of the original espeak-generic.conf file, here are some of the reasons. Espeak is very poor in responsiveness on one of the sound cards in my desktop when using portaudio. This seems to be the sound card as the other sound card and my laptop work fine with portaudio. By using aplay, this solved the issue, and also at the time meant that alsa was used for output. So some may be able to get away without aplay, but things seem more reliable with it. The comment in the file about the punctuation, is to do with the echo "$DATA" as there seemed to be a problem when handing some punctuation to speak as an option. This may have changed now, but was needed at the time (something like version 1.08). Hope this answers the question From Michael Whapples Lorenzo Taylor writes: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Normally, it would be best to just speak the data with a > straight-forward speak command line. However, some bugs have come up, > possibly in the portaudio interface that cause problems when doing this. > There is also a comment in the module that suggests there is some kind of > bug with punctuation characters when running the speak command in this > way. I also noticed a decrease in responsiveness in eSpeak 1.16 when > using the speak command without a pipe, but this is something new to > versions later than 1.13, most likely having to do with portaudio19. > > HTH, > Lorenzo > - -- > I've always found anomalies to be very relaxing. It's a curse. > - --Jadzia Dax: Star Trek Deep Space Nine (The Assignment) > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFFI/3ZG9IpekrhBfIRAkIrAJ92TbtRwsUt6WfqfxNIVcUJ1aHXaACbBKvi > DRLOBi++hU0D+WlhKKL+/AU= > =1mNs > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > >
