Orca and eSpeak

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <Pine.LNX.4.62.0609221023490.31361 at localhost.localdomain>,
   Willem van der Walt <wvdwalt at csir.co.za> wrote:
> Orca uses gnome-speech which has a driver for speech-dispatcher which
> can be configured to use espeak. If espeak is the default voice of
> speech-dispatcher, it will work. Regards, Willem

I asked about this on the Ubuntu Accessibility list, and got this
answer from Luke Yelavich:

On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 08:40:08PM EST, Jonathan Duddington wrote:
> I've been asked whether Orca can use the eSpeak software synthesizer.
> 
> I believe that Gnome Speech can be set up to use Speech Dispatcher,
> and Speech Dispatcher can use eSpeak.  So in theory the answer seems
> to be "yes".  Has anyone done this, and does it work in practice? 
> Does responsiveness suffer as a result of the additional intermediary?

I have used orca with speech-dispatcher via gnome-speech, but not with 
espeak. It is to say the least, very clunky. There is a speech output 
module under development for orca for interfacing directly with 
speech-dispatcher, but it is still very much in the early stages.

> Or would it be better to write a Gnome Speech driver for eSpeak?  The
> drivers seem fairly small but I don't understand the environment in
> which they are written (concepts such as bonobo, oaf, corba etc). But
> if someone wants to write a driver then I'll be happy to assist.

What would actually be better, is to have a module written for 
speech-dispatcher to interface with the espeak shared library, rather 
than call the command-line utility all the time. Personally, I feel 
gnome-speech needs to be removed, and speech-dispatcher should be the 
speech back-end of choice.

Espeak will very likely be a synthesizer that will be used for various 
tasks in the next release of Ubuntu, such as spoken boot, 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SpokenBoot.

I intend to get the newest version fo espeak packaged in the next few 
days.