Latest on Read Etexts and espeak

[James Simmons]

Tony,

It looks like every day I make some progress.  I finally figured out 
that the reason text to speech was not pausing between sentences and 
paragraphs was that I was stripping all the punctuation out of the text 
before sending it on to espeak.  I have to create an XML document marked 
up with SSIP tags and pass that to speech-dispatcher instead of the raw 
text.  The reason for this is that SD needs these tags so it can do a 
callback into my code before it speaks a word.  That's the only way I 
can do word highlighting.  In the process of creating this marked up 
page I stripped out all the punctuation.  Even my wife thought that was 
a stupid thing to do.

My highlighting still sometimes lags behind the words being spoken, 
especially when there is a string of short words.  It tends to catch up 
on the longer words.  I'm going to try to make the code that highlights 
the words more efficient.  It may be doing some things it doesn't need 
to do.

This morning I noticed that if speech-dispatcher -d is running then 
mplayer can't open /dev/dsp so I don't get any sound when I play a 
movie.  spd-say continues to work.  I don't know if this is an SD 
problem or an mplayer problem.  I hope this doesn't mean that if we use 
SD on the XO then Tam Tam doesn't work.  I have posted a question to the 
SD mailing list on this.

I should have a much improved Read Etexts published in the usual place 
some time this weekend.

Thanks,

James Simmons