software speech for speakup

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi All,

Ok, here is my penny's worth on software speech for speakup. I certinly don't mean to flame or unconstructively critisize here, so please read on if you're interested. There are some of us that don't have serial ports on a PC, but do have a sound card supported in Linux (based on some earlier posts I've seen on this list, I know I'm not alone in this situation). As a result, I would personally like to entirely blow away the other OS on such a machine, and dedicate it to Linux (simply because I'm getting tired of using the other OS on it, and because all its hardware is Linux compatible). I know that Kirk mentioned that he was working on a software synth that would work with speakup in the far future, and that he wouldn't write anything for IBM viavoice, because it wasn't an opensource product. However, as I stated earlier, there are thoes of us that would like to be able to use software speech with speakup in the very soon future (now). Yes, I know that I could use emacspeak which supports viavoice. However, I've recently downloaded it and played with it for two days (even read  the howto). Given a choice of access though, I would much rather stick with speakup. Thus, not writing a driver for a product that is not opensource (and so far for me works without a hitch) is a serious limitation to access. Speakup certinly doesn't have to be distributted with viavoice (emacspeak isn't), but it would be nice to have the option of using it. It shouldn't be that hard to modify a dectalk or doubletalk PC driver to work with the speech engine. I've taken c++ my junior and senior years of high scghool (AP computer science). Even so, I have somewhat of an understanding on how the sample programs work that come with the engine. I also plan to read the API docs, and hopefully learn more. As you can see, I'm not a candidate to write the speakup driver for viavoice, so I'm not volenteering. I certinly wouldn't mind switching to the opensource engine when it became usable. However ... ok, I've wined enough. Kirk, I guess I'm simply asking you if you could possibly consider changing your mind regarding viavoice as a speech engine for speakup for now at least. If there is anyone else here that agrees with me, please write so that we could see how many more takers there are, and maybe try to persaude Kirk some more to change his mind. Thanks for reading.
Greg