Speakup and ViaVoice.

[Brian Borowski]

There's been a thread about speakup and ViaVoice and writing the code to
make this work.  I wanted to point out a few things about this idea, that
are going to have to be worked out.

*  ViaVoice is a software synthesizer and the kernel has to be running,
and most of the other parts of linux have to be operational before
anything can be done with a software synthesizer, unless it gets totally
built into the kernel; that could make a kernel huge, and would also
require that sound card stuff (there are very many sound cards out there),
be loaded into the kernel as well.

*  You would miss the real-time boot-up stuff from the kernel, a very
important feature, in my opinion, especially when trying to figure out
what is going on when something is not working as it should be, or when
you're trying to build a kernel and something isn't quite working write.
You could make use of the kernel message buffer to have the software
synthesizer speak the startup messages after the fact, but if there was a
failure during bootup; you would never get the opportunity to hear
anything at all, because you'd never get the speech started up.

*  Then, finally, there's another thing, the kernel is open source,
speakup is open source, the information is available for the software
synthesizer API, and perhaps, with some imagination, someone can figure
out a solution for the above two points.  If someone really wants this
badly enough, why can't they put some effort into coding for this project.

There's more than enough work with the normal speakup development to keep
a few Kirks busy, without even worrying about ViaVoice, so I suspect, that
this is one of those projects that someone else will have to do.  If
there's no one else to do it; it probably won't get done for a very long
time.

Brian Borowski