Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1
=========================================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of
Speech Dispatcher 0.5-rc1 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project.

This is a Release Candidate version, so we invite everyone to help
us testing it before we finally release the 0.5 version.

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
  synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
  synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
  of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
  is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
  to speech synthesis.

  The architecture of Speech Dispatcher is based on a proven
  client/server model. The basic means of client communication
  with Speech Dispatcher is through a TCP connection using the Speech
  Synthesis Interface Protocol (SSIP).

  Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

  - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
    connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
    and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

  - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers
    so that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
    synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos and
    (non-free) Dectalk software are supported.

  - Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
    settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library, Common Lisp and Guile interface. The
    Python interface is being worked on. An Elisp library is
    developed as a sperate project speechd-el. Possibly an interface
    to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.5-rc1?

 - SSIP now supports SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) messages.

 - Communication with Festival is highly improved.

 - Improved DTK Software Synthesis support.

 NOTE: The communication mode of the Festival output module (SSML mode)
 is incompatible with the previous festival-freebsoft-utils releases.
 You need to install festival-freebsoft-utils 0.3 or higher!

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.5-rc1.tar.gz

  You also need to get festival-freebsoft-utils in version 0.3 or newer
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/festival-freebsoft-utils/

  We recommend you to fetch the sound icons Speech Dispatcher can use as
  well. They are available at
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  Corresponding Debian packages will be available at your
  Debian distribution mirror as soon as the official version 0.5 is released.
  (We would highly appreciate any help with RPM distribution!)

  The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at <speechd at bugs.freebsoft.org>. For other
  contact please use <speechd at freebsoft.org>
  

Happy synthesizing!