feasibility of speechdispatcher to dtlk?

[Chris Brannon]

Tom Fowle <wa6ivgtf at fastmail.fm> writes:

> Any thoughts on the feasibility of writing a dtlk driver for
> speechdispatcher?

It shouldn't be too bad for someone with the will to do it.
People have been talking about writing hardware synth drivers for SD for
a long time, but no one has actually done it.

Also, I'm sorry to say that hardware speech will not make gnome and orca
more performant on an older box.  The software speech is not a problem.
I've used espeakup on a Dell Lattitude C610 with a 700
MHz processor and 256 megabytes of RAM, and it performed beautifully.  I
used the eflite speech server for emacspeak on a Toshiba Tecra laptop
with a 166 MHz CPU and 64 megabytes of RAM.  Again, it performed like a
champ.  In fact, this was my working environment for most of 2005.
Software speech just isn't that resource intensive.  The only time it is
a problem is when the machine is under a painfully heavy load.

> I thought I had a memory that early orca could drive dtlk, probably
> pre-speechdispatcher?

Orca used to be able to use emacspeak speech servers.  Hopefully it
still can.  Anyway, there's an Emacspeak speech server for the
Doubletalk.  It was part of the emacspeak-ss package on the old blinux
ftp site.  That site seems to be dead now, but I think Debian is still
distributing emacspeak-ss.

Good luck,
-- Chris