Unix

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
It sounds like things are quite successful. Let's see if yasr actually 
works, we can do this before you have everything sorted with the 
doubletalk (although getting it to work with that would possibly be the 
best thing in the long term). To try it out we can use freetts for 
software speech output, as I said hopefully you can get the doubletalk 
working later if you don't like the freetts voice (I am not a great fan 
of freetts's voices).

OK, so to get freetts working you will need java installed (I don't know 
whether the mac comes with java preinstalled), but if it doesn't I 
wouldn't imagine it would be the hardest thing to get and install. Now 
download freetts from http://freetts.sf.net. You only need the binary 
version (I used freetts-1.2.2-bin.zip). Unzip the zipfile somewhere, and 
change to the directory in which it was unpacked. Now start it as an 
emacspeak server with a command like:
java -jar bin/FreeTTSEmacspeakServer.jar
and hopefully you will get output saying about it starting and which 
voice it is using and that it is listening on port 2222. Unfortunately 
that above command doesn't return you to a shell prompt so either you 
will need to start another or add the & after the command, like so:
java -jar bin/FreeTTSEmacspeakServer.jar &
Now we can start yasr. The following command I will give means you need 
not set up the configuration file, although in the longer term you will 
probably want to so as to avoid the extra typing.
yasr -s "emacspeak server" -p 127.0.0.1:2222

Hopefully now you will have yasr talking.

A couple of notes about the above:
* You must remember to start freetts as an emacspeak server before 
trying to use yasr.
* By providing the -s and -p options to yasr it doesn't matter what the 
setting for synthesiser and synthesiser port are in yasr.conf as the 
options take priority.
* You may want to put some of the above into a shell script so you 
always have a way to start yasr with freetts, but only ever need the one 
command (I did find an example of one on the web, I think it was written 
for solaris, but it might be a good starting point for you to adapt it 
for the paths and such like which are specific to mac).

Let us know if you get the above working, if so it hopefully will only 
be a small matter to get the doubletalk working.

Michael Whapples