Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 Release Candidate 1 (request for help with testing)

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 Release Candidate 1
==============================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability
of Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7-rc1 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project. This is a release candidate, we kindly ask you for your
help with testing it before the official release.
Please read `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.

   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 separate project speechd-el. Possibly an interface
     to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.6.7?

  - Setting of preferred audio output method is now centralized in
    speechd.conf instead of being scattered around the various
    output module configurations.

  - 'spd-conf' configuration, diagnostics and troubleshooting tool
    now makes it easy to create a user configuration for Speech Dispatcher
    or to send a request for help with all appropriate logging information

  - Dummy output module which attempts to play a pre-recorded help
    message via various sound systems when all other modules fail

  - Possibility to switch on verbose logging over SSIP
    for easy debugging and bug-reporting from client applications

  - Volume settings in Pulse Audio and avoidance of having to reopen
    the PA connection on every synthesis request

  - Punctuation mechanism in IBM TTS is now configurable

  - Bugfixes.

  NOTES (0.6.7)

    - There are changes in the configuration file since the previous
      release. It is highly recommended to replace your speechd.conf
      file with the speechd.conf provided in this package and copy your
      settings there if you are upgrading from 0.6.6 or any older
      versions. The old configuration file should also work, but
      audio output method settings in output modules configuration
      will have no effect.

    - By default, the communication port of Speech Dispatcher is only
      opened for localhost connections. Please see the
      LocalhostAccessOnly option in speechd.conf for information on how
      to allow connections from other manchines as well.

    - Pulse Audio support is still in an experimental stage and might
      not work with new versions of PA.

* Where to get it?

   You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.7-rc1.tar.gz

   Corresponding Debian and Ubuntu packages can be found in

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/snapshot-debian/
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/snapshot-ubuntu/

   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

   The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* How to report bugs?

   Please report bugs at <speechd-bugs at lists.freebsoft.org>. For other
   contact please use <speechd at lists.freebsoft.org>

Happy synthesizing!