Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Gilles Casse]

Hi,

> When using the espeak binary (not the speak, not tried that, so using the 
> shared lib), I now have quite a long delay from pressing the enter key after 
> typing the command and the speech. 

This one is related to PortAudio V19 and depends on the current chipset.
The PortAudio mailing list has been contacted.
In principle, this issue  only affects the command line (or
Speech-Dispatcher or gnome-speech).

Could you please indicate which is your sound chip or audio card?

> When using the espeak 
> command, if I have speakup speaking (using speechd-up and speech-dispatcher, 
> producing sound using alsa) then espeak can start speaking across the output 
> (multiple sound output, possibly success), but if espeak starts speaking 
> before speakup is made to speak, then espeak blocks the sound card and 
> speakup speech doesn't come through. 

This behaviour might be hopefully improved in eSpeak for some chipsets.
Otherwise, patch might be offered to PortAudio.

A little bit of development time is needed.

Cheers,

Gilles



-- 
Oralux http://oralux.org

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Michael Whapples]

The chipset in question is a built in audio device on a laptop and alsa uses 
the I82801DBICH4 driver. As far as things seem to go, normally this has 
behaved well, but I don't know technically whether there may be some 
problems.

From
Michael Whapples
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gilles Casse" <gcasse@oralux.org>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 4:54 PM
Subject: Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa


> Hi,
>
>> When using the espeak binary (not the speak, not tried that, so using the
>> shared lib), I now have quite a long delay from pressing the enter key 
>> after
>> typing the command and the speech.
>
> This one is related to PortAudio V19 and depends on the current chipset.
> The PortAudio mailing list has been contacted.
> In principle, this issue  only affects the command line (or
> Speech-Dispatcher or gnome-speech).
>
> Could you please indicate which is your sound chip or audio card?
>
>> When using the espeak
>> command, if I have speakup speaking (using speechd-up and 
>> speech-dispatcher,
>> producing sound using alsa) then espeak can start speaking across the 
>> output
>> (multiple sound output, possibly success), but if espeak starts speaking
>> before speakup is made to speak, then espeak blocks the sound card and
>> speakup speech doesn't come through.
>
> This behaviour might be hopefully improved in eSpeak for some chipsets.
> Otherwise, patch might be offered to PortAudio.
>
> A little bit of development time is needed.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gilles
>
>
>
> -- 
> Oralux http://oralux.org
>
>
>
> 

Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I have tried orca with gnome-speech and the gnome-speech espeak driver, and initially it seems to work well. The one question I have (as it is most noticable) is getting espeak to work with alsa and allow other sounds to play at the same time. Note this can be done on my system with speech-dispatcher so the sound card can do it, but I find sometimes speech-dispatcher dies occasionally, and removing as many stages as possible seems to me to be much more preferable (just my oppinion).

Anyway what have I done. Portaudio18 does not support alsa, so I compiled espeak with portaudio19. When using the defaults for compiling portaudio19, espeak seemed not to use alsa (so I think), so I compiled it with only alsa support. Espeak works fine like this, except it still doesn't speak with other alsa sounds in the background, and issues a error (refering to alsa files, I can give this error if it would help anyone). Gnome-speech works with everything like this, but sound while speech is going on is not possible.

So can I solve this? would it help to configure alsa and jack, and use the jack output of portaudio? Or would something else solve the problem?

Any help is welcome.

From
Michael Whapples

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <BAY103-DAV786181796A5528CB285258E8A0@phx.gbl>,

> Anyway what have I done. Portaudio18 does not support alsa, so I
> compiled espeak with portaudio19.

I think some versions of portaudio19 work better than others.

Try using the latest development snapshot of portaudio19 from:
 http://www.portaudio.com/
and the eSpeak version 1.20 from:
 http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

I'm not very familiar with topics such as portaudio and also, but
Gilles Casse <gcasse@oralux.org>  has been looking at this.

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Michael Whapples]

To give a few more details on this, I am using espeak 1.20 and the current 
stable portaudio 19 (I think 061121 as I remember). Gnome-speech is from SVN 
at rev 278.

I will try with the latest portaudio19 snapshot to see if that makes a 
difference.

From
Michael Whapples 

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Tomas Cerha]

Michael Whapples napsal(a):
> Note this can be done on my system with speech-dispatcher so the
> sound card can do it, but I find sometimes speech-dispatcher dies
> occasionally, and removing as many stages as possible seems to me
> to be much more preferable (just my oppinion).

I know it doesn't answer your question, but your feedback might help to
fix the problem with Speech Dispatcher.  Were you using Orca with Speech
Dispatcher backend, or a Speech Dispatcher Gnome Speech driver?

Note that Speech Dispatcher backend allows Orca to communicate directly
with Speech Dispatcher.  See http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher

Did you try using Speech Dispatcher with anything else than espeak?

Best regards, Tomas

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Michael Whapples]

I am using speech-dispatcher through gnome-speech with orca when I get the 
problems with speech-dispatcher (I have occasionally had it when using 
speechd-up, although not as much as those reporting problems with AMD64, and 
normally when using speakup there is orca in the background of the gnome 
session (I sometimes have orca but not speechd-up and think I have had the 
problem)).

Some time ago, I did try the speech-dispatcher back-end for orca, but didn't 
continue to use it as I remember that there were some issues with it knowing 
when the speech had finished and sometimes missing parts of speech. Also 
whenever I do an update I would need to re-apply the back-end, or so went my 
experience.

From
Michael Whapples
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tomas Cerha" <cerha@brailcom.org>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 11:37 AM
Subject: Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa


> Michael Whapples napsal(a):
>> Note this can be done on my system with speech-dispatcher so the
>> sound card can do it, but I find sometimes speech-dispatcher dies
>> occasionally, and removing as many stages as possible seems to me
>> to be much more preferable (just my oppinion).
>
> I know it doesn't answer your question, but your feedback might help to
> fix the problem with Speech Dispatcher.  Were you using Orca with Speech
> Dispatcher backend, or a Speech Dispatcher Gnome Speech driver?
>
> Note that Speech Dispatcher backend allows Orca to communicate directly
> with Speech Dispatcher.  See http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher
>
> Did you try using Speech Dispatcher with anything else than espeak?
>
> Best regards, Tomas
>
>
> 

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Tomas Cerha]

Michael Whapples wrote:
> Some time ago, I did try the speech-dispatcher back-end for orca, but didn't 
> continue to use it as I remember that there were some issues with it knowing 
> when the speech had finished and sometimes missing parts of speech.

Any more details on this would be greatly appreciated.  Part of it might
have already been solved, since the backend now supports speech progress
notifications.  Anyway, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  Could
you please give an example for each problem?  Thank you very much for
your answer.

> Also whenever I do an update I would need to re-apply the back-end

This will change soon, since the Speech Dispatcher backend will be
included in Orca (in a few weeks).

Best regards, Tomas.

Re: Espeak, gnome-speech and alsa

[Michael Whapples]

To further this more, I have now tried updating to the latest portaudio19 
snapshot, this gives interesting results.

When using the espeak binary (not the speak, not tried that, so using the 
shared lib), I now have quite a long delay from pressing the enter key after 
typing the command and the speech. The latency when using gnome-speech 
doesn't seem to be increased much (if at all). When using the espeak 
command, if I have speakup speaking (using speechd-up and speech-dispatcher, 
producing sound using alsa) then espeak can start speaking across the output 
(multiple sound output, possibly success), but if espeak starts speaking 
before speakup is made to speak, then espeak blocks the sound card and 
speakup speech doesn't come through. When using gnome-speech and orca, I 
have never got it like this to produce speech and sound.

So could this be a portaudio problem? Does libespeak produce the sound (via 
portaudio) or does it give the sound data back to whatever is using the lib? 
I suppose I am getting at, is it that the gnome-speech espeak driver needs 
to support alsa for me to get sound and speech working this way, or can I do 
it by getting libespeak to use alsa?

From
Michael Whapples