ttsynth and speakup connector.

ttsynth and speakup connector.

[Luke Yelavich]

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Hey folks.
I am currently using ttsynth with the speakup connector utility, and so 
far, I am quite impressed. The synth is incredibly responsive, even on a 
dual celeron 466Mhz box. One thing I have noticed however, is that 
speech does not shut up very quickly when one presses a key, or the 
control key. Speech also overlaps when quickly skimming over text, 
either by line, word, or character. I'd say this has something to do 
with ALSA being used, but is probably not too hard to work around in the 
code. The utility also randomly crashes sometimes, and I hope to see if 
I can debug that.

Janina, what is the speakup connector source code license?

I can make Ubuntu/Debian packages if people are interested.
- -- 
Luke Yelavich
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Email & MSN: themuso@themuso.com
Jabber: themuso@jabber.org.au
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Re: ttsynth and speakup connector.

[Lukas Loehrer]

Luke Yelavich writes ("ttsynth and speakup connector."):
> speech does not shut up very quickly when one presses a key, or the 
> control key. Speech also overlaps when quickly skimming over text, 
> either by line, word, or character. I'd say this has something to do 
> with ALSA being used, but is probably not too hard to work around in the 
> code. The utility also randomly crashes sometimes, and I hope to see if 
> I can debug that.

The overlapping speech problem could be related to the use of a too
large hardware buffer size in conjuction with software mixing (dmix).
I suppose that when software mixing is used, the snd_pcm_drop()
function called by one process cannot cancel waveform data that is
already written to the buffer shared by all processes, otherwise it
would also cancel data written by other processes. Anyway, the
solution is to use a relatively small hardware buffer. You can use
snd_pcm_hw_params_set_buffer_size_near (), however, this can fail if
other processes have already set a larger buffer size. In my
experience, the best way to force a consistently small buffer is to
use a ~/.asoundrc file and force the buffer and period size there. I
pasted mine at the end of this mail. The emacspeak svn repository
contains another a bit more sophisticated example:

http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/servers/linux-outloud/asoundrc 

Best regards, Lukas

Example follows:

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dmixer  {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
	ipc_perm 0660
	ipc_key_add_uid false  
	ipc_gid audio
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        format s16_LE
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 0
}

Re: ttsynth and speakup connector.

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Luke:

Luke Yelavich writes:
> I am currently using ttsynth with the speakup connector utility, and so 
> far, I am quite impressed. The synth is incredibly responsive, even on a 
> dual celeron 466Mhz box. One thing I have noticed however, is that 
> speech does not shut up very quickly when one presses a key, or the 
> control key. Speech also overlaps when quickly skimming over text, 
> either by line, word, or character. I'd say this has something to do 
> with ALSA being used, but is probably not too hard to work around in the 
> code. The utility also randomly crashes sometimes, and I hope to see if 
> I can debug that.


There are strings that crash ibmtts in its various incarnations, whether
our TTSynth version on Linux or Eloquence on Windows. For instance, take
the spaces out of the following:

c a e s u r e

A recent vim package name also crashed ibmtts.


> 
> Janina, what is the speakup connector source code license?
> 
LGPL

PS: Speakup connector was originally contributed by Marc Mulcahy. Others
have since enhanced the code some.

> I can make Ubuntu/Debian packages if people are interested.
> - -- 
One less thing for us to do! <grin>

Janina

Re: ttsynth and speakup connector.

[Steve Holmes]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 08:30:16PM -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> There are strings that crash ibmtts in its various incarnations, whether
> our TTSynth version on Linux or Eloquence on Windows. For instance, take
> the spaces out of the following:
> 
> c a e s u r e
> 
> A recent vim package name also crashed ibmtts.

That is a big turn off for me.  I recall the numerous elequance bugs
people had with Jaws and such.  I would have though that after so many
years with this bug lying around, it would have been fixed by now.  It
may be nice to have that quality speech synth but if it randomly
crashes with certain input strings, I'll just say "N!"

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