Speakup and ViaVoice.

[Thomas Ward]

Hello, Bryan and others. Certainly points are well made that Viavoice is
memory, processor, and system entensive. However, long term is proving to
double and triple in CPU output.
Naturally, I use a Dectalk Express, and love using  it under Linux. However,
while taking my laptop out carying around a $1200 synth is a bit crazy, and
always takes time setting up.
How I see this is that someone would use a hardware synth to setup there
Linux Distro, enable the sound card, and then  compile software speech
support.
I am not suggesting that this should be something that needs to be done
right away. Merely something to think about.


----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Borowski <brianb at braille.uwo.ca>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 7:46 AM
Subject: Speakup and ViaVoice.


> 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
>
>
>
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