Speech Dispatcher 0.6.4 released

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6.4
=======================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability
of Speech Dispatcher 0.6.4 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project. This is a minor release, it contains mostly bugfixes and
minor improvements. 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, Espeak
    and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS are supported. Festival
    is an advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting various
    languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual synthesizer.

  - 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.

* What is new in 0.6.4?

- Native output module for eSpeak (thanks to Lukas Loehrer)
- Support for punctuation settings in the Generic output module
    (thanks to Steve Holmes)
- Bug fixes (SMP related bugs, bugs in libspeechd and others)
- Default audio output for all modules switched to ALSA
- Support for listing output modules and voices supported by
   a synthesizer

NOTES (0.6.4)

   - Orca supports Speech Dispatcher without needs for any patch
     in its latest releases.

   - All output modules (except generic) are turned to use ALSA
     by default. Generic output modules use ALSA when possible.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.4.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, Gentoo and Ubuntu packages will soon be
  available at  your distribution mirrors.

  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!