Read Etexts problems with speech-dispatcher resolved -- mostly

[James Simmons]

Hemant,

Thanks for the reply.  I'll try to get to using those new RPMs when I 
can.  I hope the Python fix does the trick.  It would save me from 
having to rewrite the Activity.

I understand about the instructions for installing the RPMs not being on 
the Wiki.  I just mentioned that for the benefit of others on the 
mailing list who might want to try out the Activity with speech.

I am more concerned about the synchronization problems I'm having with 
text highlighting.  As you know if you've tried my activity, the 
highlighting tends to lag behind the speech and some words never get 
highlighted at all.  It may be that we can't count on espeak to do the 
callbacks in a timely manner and would be better off using festival or 
something else.  I know that the code for the Speak activity has some 
commented out code for supporting speech-dispatcher.  I borrowed a lot 
of it for my own Activity.  So if the author of Speak can fix that up we 
might be able to remove espeak without hurting anything much.  I haven't 
tried festival myself, though.

Thanks again,

James Simmons


Hemant Goyal wrote:

> Hi James,
>
> I did explore a few solutions to the problem and make the speechd API 
> use gobjects to make the communication with the speech server 
> asynchronous. I believe a certain bugfix in python 2.6 will resolve 
> the problems we are facing, hence for the moment it was decided to 
> postpone the modification of the speechd API (also modification of the 
> API implementation was not so straightforward).