Idea: language plugins

[Milan Zamazal]

>>>>> "JD" == Jonathan Duddington <jsd at clara.co.uk> writes:

    JD> I like the idea of language-specific plugins in a centralised
    JD> place (i.e. in Speech Dispatcher) which can be used with
    JD> different synthesizers.

It's not a necessarily bad idea to make a common TTS preprocessing
frontend to synthesizers which don't process text very well themselves.
But again: Speech Dispatcher is a _dispatcher_, not a _processor_, so it
would be a very wrong place for this.

If anybody would like to work on the common TTS preprocessor, I
encourage him to look at TTS API provider
(http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api-provider) and TTS API
(http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api).  This is what the next generation
Speech Dispatcher (and hopefully other pieces of software that need to
access speech synthesis directly) will use for speech synthesis and it
is the proper place to add functionality like this.

    JD> But applying different grammatical inflections to numbers,
    JD> depending on context, is beyond the ability of a general-purpose
    JD> multi-language synthesizer such as eSpeak.

Why?  Do you mean it's just an eSpeak limitation or a general problem?

Regards,

Milan Zamazal