eSpeak - added punctuation and capitals indications

[Gary Cramblitt]

On Saturday 22 April 2006 06:14, Jonathan Duddington wrote:
> eSpeak is a compact open-source text-to-speech engine which I hope to
> adapt to work well with Speech Dispatcher.
>
>
> I've added the ability to indicate punctuation and capital letters in
> the text by either speaking their name, or by playing a sound.
>
> I'm not sure whether what I've done is exactly what's wanted, so if
> anyone wants to try it and let me know of suggestions for improvements,
> please do so.
>
> eSpeak text-to-speech is at:
>    http://espeak.sourceforge.net
>
> download the file:  test-1.09d-linux.zip
>
> The ReadMe file inside gives the details.  It can speak either all
> punctuation or just a specified set of punctuation characters.  It can
> speak their names, or you can set up sound files (sound icons) to be
> played instead.
>
> Capital letters can be indicated by a sound, or by the word "capital",
> or by raising the pitch of the capitalized word.
>
> Also the feature of embedding commands within the text has been updated.
>
> Questions which I'm unsure about:
>
> 1.  Should end-of-line be indicated?
>
> 2.  What about apostrophes within words. Currently these are not
> indicated when speaking text since that would disrupt the pronunciation
> of the word.
>
> 3.  The punctuation name is spoken in a slightly different tone from
> the main text, to differentiate it.  Is that OK?
>
> 4.  The actual names for punctuation characters are defined in the
> data/english_list file, so these can be changed if needed (then do
> speak --compile).
>
> 5.  If the text is spoken at a fast rate, should the sound icons also
> be shortened in duration?
>
> 6.  What is the best value for the pitch raise which indicates
> capitals?  This is currently adjustable with the -k option to allow
> experimentation.
>
> 7.  How should multiple capitals in a word be indicated?  Or a capital
> which is not the first character of a word?  Or does that only need to
> be considered when speaking letters individually (spelling)?
>
> 8.  Have I misunderstood the whole point of this, and punctuation and
> capital indications are only needed when spelling out individual
> characters?


-- 
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php
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