Speech-dispatcher, etextRead activity and espeak

[James Simmons]

Tony,

Last night I was able to do a yum install of speech-dispatcher and 
speech-dispatcher-python in Fedora 10, so there is a good chance that 
the same thing would work on the XO.  I have not tried it.  The install 
will bring in festival-lite, at about 7 megabytes, which you shouldn't 
need and may be able to uninstall later.  (On the other hand, if it 
works better than espeak it might be worth keeping). The configuration 
files are in the /etc/speech-dispatcher directory and they look mostly 
OK.  They have an entry to load Festival which you should probably 
comment out since you won't have Festival installed.  Unfortunately, 
when I tried starting it up with this command:

speech-dispatcher -d

it complained about ALSA not being able to connect to the sound device 
because of some issue with Pulse-Audio.  It sounds kind of like the 
problem described here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/speech-dispatcher/+bug/213755

There is a page on the OLPC Wiki that mentions speech-dispatcher:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Screen_Reader

This page is out of date and it incorrectly suggests setting up 
espeak-generic, which does NOT support the callbacks needed for Karaoke 
highlighting.  If I can figure out how to get SD working with Fedora 10 
or the XO I will update this page.  I'll also update the page for Read 
Etexts.  Until then just be aware it's wrong.

If you want to have a crack at solving this yourself, please go ahead.  
I don't have any special expertise for installing SD.

Thanks,

James Simmons


Tony Anderson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The educational team at OLENepal would like a 'karaoke-style' text 
> reader above all other activities on the XO. This is primarily for 
> English. Looking at the activity code, it looks like the speech code 
> is there but disabled.
>
> Would it be possible to release a version that supports espeak without 
> the Speech-Dispatcher pending its implementation in Sugar? This would 
> give us a chance to experiment with creating 'read-aloud' stories.
>
> Tony
>
>
>
> > Thanks for your response.  I never questioned that there was still
> > interest in TTS on the XO.  What I was wondering is if there was any
> > progress made by Hemant Goyal or anyone else in getting the
> > Speech-Dispatcher software included with the Sugar distribution, if the
> > newer version of Python that resolved the power management issue was
> > included, etc.  I've sent a couple of emails to Hemant and haven't 
> heard
> > back from him.  I was wondering if he was still working on these 
> things,
> > or if someone else had taken over his work, etc.  He was making RPMs 
> for
> > Fedora for installing speech-dispatcher.
> >
> > James Simmons
>