Espeak information

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <20060514031907.GA2160 at test1>,
   Tyler Spivey <tspivey at pcdesk.net> wrote:

> I primarilly want to change the pause after periods, 

In eSpeak version 1.10, the pause after a period is defined in file
translate.cpp.  Near the beginning of the file, there is a line:

  #define CLAUSE_PERIOD    35

which sets the pause after a period to 350 mS. (35 x 10).  This is
later adjusted in proportion to the speed of speaking, i.e. it's
reduced if speaking faster.

So, if you want to increase or decrease the gap between sentences, then
you could change this value and recompile eSpeak.  What value do you
think is best?

However, if the problem is that you're getting a sentence pause when
there's not actually an end-of-sentence (eg. after a period that
indicates an abbreviation rather than end-of-sentence) then that's a
different problem, one of sentence boundary detection.  Let me know if
that's the case.  It could be either eSpeak or the program that's using
it that's incorrectly detecting sentence breaks.

> ... and change the pause encountered upon the receit of a new line
> to 0.

eSpeak doesn't add a pause at end of line as such.

It adds a paragraph pause (defined by  #define CLAUSE_PARAGRAPH) if it
finds two consecutive end-of-line (i.e. a blank line).

It adds a pause (defined by  #define CLAUSE_EOF) at the end of the text
which the calling program asks it to speak, if there isn't already a
sentence-pause.  You could try reducing this value to find whether that
does what you want.

A new version of eSpeak will work better with Speech Dispatcher, which
will call it with a function-call interface rather than running it as a
command-line program for each utterance.  eSpeak will allow the calling
program to suppress the end-of-text pause in cases, for example, where
it's being used to echo text as it's typed rather than reading a text
passage.