Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I have tried orca with gnome-speech and the gnome-speech espeak driver, and initially it seems to work well. The one question I have (as it is most noticable) is getting espeak to work with alsa and allow other sounds to play at the same time. Note this can be done on my system with speech-dispatcher so the sound card can do it, but I find sometimes speech-dispatcher dies occasionally, and removing as many stages as possible seems to me to be much more preferable (just my oppinion).

Anyway what have I done. Portaudio18 does not support alsa, so I compiled espeak with portaudio19. When using the defaults for compiling portaudio19, espeak seemed not to use alsa (so I think), so I compiled it with only alsa support. Espeak works fine like this, except it still doesn't speak with other alsa sounds in the background, and issues a error (refering to alsa files, I can give this error if it would help anyone). Gnome-speech works with everything like this, but sound while speech is going on is not possible.

So can I solve this? would it help to configure alsa and jack, and use the jack output of portaudio? Or would something else solve the problem?

Any help is welcome.

From
Michael Whapples