eSpeak - new release

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <20060809115115.GA30779 at hhs48.com>,
   <chuckh at hhs48.com> wrote:

> Nice job. Thanks for this upgrade. The default volume of the speak
> command is okay, but I had a bit of a time getting speech-dispatcher
> 0.6.1 to match the volume. Maybe Hynek has a suggestion on that
> score. What finally  worked for me was to change the parameter "-a
> $VOLUME" to "-a 50" in the espeack-generic-conf file, after trying a
> variety of other possible fixes. Out of the box, the
> speech-dispatcher espeak-generic-conf  settings volume was much too
> low. 

Yes, it would be.

I changed the range of the -a command line option which sets the
amplitude (volume) of the speech from a non-linear range of 0 to 20
(default 10) to a linear range of 0 to 200 (default 100).  This is to
match the values in the <prosody volume=""> tag in SSML (Speech
Synthesis Markup Language).  I'd forgotten about the speech-dispatcher
settings.

BTW, I find it odd that SSML defines volume as a range of 0 to 100 with
a default of 100 (i.e. the default is maximum volume).  Is that an
error in the SSML specification?  Anyway, eSpeak can take higher values
in order to increase the volume above the default.