Re: [gnuspeech-contact] Re: Thoughts on GNUSpeech and possible accessibility applications

[Jason White]

Dalmazio Brisinda <address@hidden> wrote:

> The text to speech daemon has been partially ported to OS X. By  
> "partially" I mean given text it generates synthesized output, but there 
> is currently no intonation (something I intend to remedy shortly) or 
> other more sophisticated features. It's also accessible via OS X 
> services.

The ability to silence speech very quickly and start speaking a new message is
a particularly important additional feature that would be required for
accessibility applications.

Also desirable is the capacity to track which word is currently being spoken
in text already submitted by the application. Control over such matters as the
handling of punctuation characters (whether to announce them or simply process
them as influences upon the pausing and intonation) would need to be
controllable via the API, as would speech rate and any other tunable
parameters.

I mention these factors not as an attempt to influence development priorities
(which are of course entirely at the discretion of whoever is doing the work),
but as a synopsis of the kinds of API features that would be needed.
>
> I'm not sure about the port to Linux though, as the text to speech  
> daemon uses the OS X distributed objects architecture, and I don't know 
> to what degree this same architecture is supported on the Gnustep/Linux 
> platform. Needless to say this elegant IPC/RPC architecture makes writing 
> servers/dameons quite straightforward on OS X.


http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/Developer/Base/ProgrammingManual/manual_7.html

This appears promising.