Re: another idea for speech.

[jrebman@netcom.com (Jim Rebman)]

> legitimate question.  As of yet, there is nothing (I repeat) nothing for
> just plain shell/console users of linux to give us speech access.  That is
> what I wanted, and that is what my question was.  Now if you think that's
> boring, that's fine, but I (and several others I know) would welcome such
> a thing.  Emacspeak is for x-windows, what is there for normal shell
> users? The answer is nothing.  Now by your own words, let's keep as many
> discussions going as possible.  Well, this is one of those discussions.
> Now, as I asked before, does anyone have any ideas on how this could be
> done?


Last time for the PCWM...

NO, NO, NO!  Emacspeak is not for X-Windows -- it is for just what you 
describe; native speech access for the linux/unix console and shell 
users.  It is possible to run it in an xterm window though.  I have no 
idea of how to do this because I am not running X yet, but Raman has used 
it in this manner.  So, now you can stop ignoring Emacspeak and start 
investigating how you can put it to work for you.  Here are a couple of 
hints:

You can find Emacspeak at 
www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/emacspeak/emacspeak.html

If you do not have a dectalk express, or other serial dectalk, or an 
Alpha running the software dectalk, then you will have to write your own 
driver for your synthesizer.

The driver will have to be written in tclx (extended tcl), not in "Emacs" 
or Emacs-lisp, or assembler, or pascal, or c, or ...

Yes, there will be some work involved, and as Raman has pointed out, it 
is not too difficult, and as he has also pointed out, in this world of 
free software, there is a give and take process involved -- you take the 
Emacspeak, you write a driver for it, and you give the driver back to the 
community at large.  So now, please stop fretting about the absence of 
native speech for linux/unix -- it does exist, but it might require some 
effort to make it work.  I am running it on a pentium-166 tower machine 
with no terminal attached, and on a pentium-133 laptop.  Trust me, it 
does actually provide speech for linux.

-- JR