Speech-Dispatcher and Punctuation

[Tomas Cerha]

Steve Holmes wrote:
> I wonder how hard it would be to develope a binary
> driver program for espeak and/or Cepstral.  I do know C pretty well and
> C++ even less but it would be a good learning experience since Espeak
> has a run-time library now.

This would be the best solution.  Take a look at
http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/speechd and go to the section `Server
Programming', `Output modules'.  This should give you quite a good
estimation what this would involve.  Especially the subsection `How to
Write New Output Module'.

> Shame that speech-dispatcher doesn't support punct level changes with
> the generic setup.  Even if we modified the generic file
> somehow to trigger the --punct option for espeak, you wouldn't be able
> to support a 3 option level; you would have all or none but not some.

This should still be possible.  I would suggest the following interface
for setting it in the generic's module configuration file (example for
espeak):

GenericPunctuationNoneSwitch ""
GenericPunctuationAllSwitch "--punct"
GenericPunctuationSomeSwitch "--punct=\"$LIST\""

Then $PUNCT would get substituted in the GenericExecuteSynth by the
value of the switch corresponding to the current punctuation mode.  If
the level is SOME, $LIST would get substituted by the current list of
punctuation characters.

But this is only a suggestion and would have to be implemented...

I'm CC-ing this message to the Speech Dispatcher mailing list
(speechd at lists.freebsoft.org) and suggest continuing this debate there.

Best regards, Tomas.