Gnome Speech driver for Speech Dispatcher available

[Hynek Hanke]

Gnome Speech SpeechD Driver 0.1 beta
====================================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of the
Gnome Speech SpeechD Driver beta 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. Please read `NOTES'
bellow.

* What is Gnome Speech SpeechD Driver?

  Gnome Speech SpeechD Driver is a driver for Gnome Speech that makes
  it possible to use Gnome Speech (and thus the Gnopernicus
  screen reader) on top of Speech Dispatcher.

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device and desktop 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.

  You can get it and find more information at
	http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* Notes

  You need to install Speech Dispatcher 0.6 or higher before installing
  this version of Gnome Speech SpeechD Driver. This version of Speech
  Dispatcher is currently available as 0.6rc1 (Release Candidate 1).

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/gnome-speech-speechd-driver-0.1b.tar.gz

  The home page of the project is 
http://www.freebsoft.org/gnome-speech-speechd-driver

* 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!