Speech Dispatcher 0.6.1 Released

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6.1
=======================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of
Speech Dispatcher 0.6.1 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft project.
This is a minor release, it contains mostly bugfixes and support for new
synthesizers. 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, also 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 0.6.1?

 - Bug fixes

 - Generic output module support for the eSpeak synthesizer
	(free English speech synthesizer, GPL)

 - Output module for Cicero (french TTS, GPL but requires mbrola)
	(thanks to Olivier Bert)

 - Output module for IBM TTS (IBM TTS is non-free)
	(thanks to Gary Cramblitt)

 - Revision and stabilization of the Python interface

 NOTES (0.6.1 together with notes for 0.6)

   - A Gnome Speech output module was developed which allows you to use
     Gnopernicus with Speech Dispatcher and is available in Gnome Speech
     distribution.

   - An experimental module for Orca provides support of
     Speech Dispatcher:
   http://www.freebsoft.org/~cerha/orca/speech-dispatcher-backend.html
     (this version of Speech Dispatcher 0.6.1 is required)

   - 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-0.3 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
     festival-freebsoft-utils 0.6 available on
	http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/festival-freebsoft-utils/

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.1.tar.gz

  We recommend you to fetch the sound icons for use with Speech
  Dispatcher. They are available at

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  Corresponding Debian packages will soon be available at your
  Debian distribution mirror.

  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!