Speech Dispatcher 0.6 Release Candidate 1 available

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6rc1
========================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of
Speech Dispatcher 0.6 Release Candidate 1 developed as a part of the
Free(b)Soft project. This is not a final stable release. We will welcome
any help with testing so that we can discover possible bugs before the
final release. Please read `What is new' and `NOTES' bellow.

* 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. Festival is an
    advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting various languages.

  - 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, Python, Common Lisp and Guile interface. 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 0.6?

 - ALSA and experimental NAS sound output supported (apart from OSS)

 - SSIP implementation now supports events notification and
   index marking

 - Improved documentation

 - spd-say client functionality expanded (stopping, client name setting)

 - Better performance

 NOTES:
   - ALSA audio output is not turned on by default. If you like,
     go to etc/speech-dispatcher/modules and turn it on for your
     output module.

   - If you are using speechd-up, you likely need to upgrade to
     speechd-up-0.3rc1 due to a bug in speechd-up. Speechd-up 0.3
     also brings new capabilities, notably support for the
     ``Read all'' function in Speakup.

   - Although not necessary, we highly recommend you to install the
     new version of festival-freebsoft-utils 0.5 available on
	http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/festival-freebsoft-utils/

   - A Gnome Speech output module was developed which allows you to use
     Gnopernicus with Speech Dispatcher and is available as
     gnome-speech-speechd-driver on
        http://www.freebsoft.org/gnome-speech-speechd-driver

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6rc1.tar.gz

  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 after the final release takes place.

  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 lists.freebsoft.org>
  

Happy synthesizing!