Software Speech Synth with Speakup -- Help, please.

[Thomas D. Ward]

Hi. sorry about the delay. I have been extremely busy, and haven't been on
the net much of this week.
Anyway, the answers to your questions are below. I have placed them in the
body of your message below each of your questions.

----- Original Message -----
From: Hugh Esco <hesco at greens.org>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 11:52 AM
Subject: Software Speech Synth with Speakup -- Help, please.


> Greetings:
>
> I put these questions a few days ago and the first one in a number of ways
> over a week ago but still have seen no answers that instill in me the
> confidence to move forward.  Any and all help is appreciated.

 >
> (1)     As I am so close on having Speakup / Festival / Middleware working
> on this machine I'm working on, any ideas what it will take to finish that
> install successfully?  (My progress to date is documented in the thread:
> "Any experience w/ Debian Woody Speakup Packages?")

I'm not sure how to answer this question as I tried the speakup/festival
thing when it first came out, but there were some things I didn't like about
it so I switched to yasr as a screen reader and  software speech solution.

>
> (2)     If I were to install yasr, would it work with Speakup?  Would it
> announce kernel panics during boot-up?

Well yasr is a completely different screen reader. It uses the flite,
festival lite, synth for software speech. Yasr   works by creating a sudo
shell over top of your existing shell.
Since yasr is not kernel based you will not be able to get kernel panics
etc. As I recall speakup can only get information such as kernel panics if
you are using a hardware synth like dectalk, doubletalk, etc... When you use
festival with speakup you can toss allot of the startup info right out of
the window.
That is the inharent problem with software speech. If you want all the power
of speakup such as kernel panics then you require  a hardware synth.
If you want speech without all the bells and wistles then yasr with flite or
speakup will get you along in a pinch but you loose the ability to install
Linux from scratch, reading kernel panics, all the startup screens, etc...

>
> (3)     I already have eflite 0.3.5-2 working with emacspeak on this box,
> installed from the .deb packages.  Do I still need to re-install it from
> source?  Might this break my emacspeak installation?  Can you tell me more
> about compiling eflite with the appropriate voices?  Where would I find
> those voices?

Well, I would suggest first by upgrading to eflite 0.37, and flite 1.2. I do
have yasr and eflite rpms now, but no debian packages so I suppose unless
alien can convert them you'd have to recompile from scratch.
I typically install yasr, flite, and eflite in /usr, and that is where all
my libs are linked in my rpms in /usr/lib.
So if you attempt to use alien on these rpms make sure the packages can
locate your libs.
Hth.