[ANN] Two new toys that use Speech Dispatcher

[Richard Schwarting]

Hello Folks!

I thought you might be interested in how I'm abusing Speech Dispatcher
for my own fun and... well, not so much profit.

* DJAqua *
A Rhythmbox plugin that uses Speech Dispatcher to announce aloud a
track's artist and title at the start and end of play.
http://gitorious.org/djaqua/

* IMAqua * (oo, vain names!)
A Pidgin plugin that uses Speech Dispatcher to announce aloud a
message's sender and, optionally, its content.
http://gitorious.org/imaqua/

I started DJAqua a few months ago when I was still employed, so there
wasn't much progress.  There were a bunch of issues getting Speech
Dispatcher setup and working neatly on a Fedora installation and I've
filed bugs with RH for those and wrote to this list at the time about
an upstream issue[1].  (Sorry for being a bit offensive when speaking
about the code :)  Now I have Lots of Free Time :)  If it would be
helpful, I could formally document all the issues a simple user "like
me" has trying to use Speech Dispatcher, but I see that the crux of
some of them is being addressed on the list already (with how output
modules are chosen and fellback upon).

I'm writing some more ear-candy for my desktop, right now getting it
to announce the hour on the hour (like my friend's Mac OS X does) and
perhaps reading an e-mail's title and author aloud (in Evolution and
Thunderbird).  If you have any ideas for fun little clients (I'm
amateur), I'd be happy to stab at them.  If either of the above two
projects are of any use, but you'd like it packaged for a particular
system or something, I'll be happy to try.

Anyway, thanks for all your hard work in helping produce a usable,
pleasant API to develop with speech.  I do hope Speech Dispatcher
becomes the official speech API for GNOME 3.0.  You've helped make a
few of my quirky dreams possible.

Regards,
  Richard Schwarting

1. http://lists.freebsoft.org/pipermail/speechd/2009q2/001685.html