Text-To-Speech on Phones: Nuance Talks

[Doug Sutherland]

Kirk,

I am working with two different embedded GSM modules
and embedded hardware, both processor and speech.
I keep hearing that speakup does not yet support any
USB synthesizers, is that right? I have doubletalk RC8660
interfaced with an ARM7 processor and firmware code
that implements a USB CDC (communication device class)
serial port. This makes it generic to the OS as USB serial
device, it can use standard windows and linux drivers for
the serial port connection.

I will soon be looking into how to make this USB device work
with speakup, was wondering if there were any reasons
why no USB drivers yet, it is due to lack of specs for the
synthesizers or is there known stumbling blocks? Since
USB devices are typically enumerated when hotplug runs
the speech wouldn't be available immediately at boot time,
but aside from that, shouldn't supporting standard USB
CDC serial port be straightforward? It would also seem
that existing driver code for doubletalk lite could be used
and adapted for different port connection.

Any tips or suggestions? How can we make it so speakup
will just catch an exception, but not hard fail, if the port it
is trying to access is not available yet? This would be the
case of a USB device when at boot time it has not been
enumerated during the hotplug initialization. Ideas?

Thanks,
Doug