Announcing the OpenTTS project, a fork of speech-dispatcher

[Luke Yelavich]

I am writing to announce a fork of speech-dispatcher, the open source 
text-to-speech framework, initially developed by Brailcom as a part of the 
freebsoft project, http://www.freebsoft.org. The fork also includes other 
important components of the speech stack, including speechd-up, the connector 
between speakup and speech-dispatcher, and the speech-dispatcher java bindings. 
As you may have guessed from the subject, the fork is now called OpenTTS. 
OpenTTS refers to both the speech server, API and documentation, as well as the 
umbrella project as a whole. The other projects mentioned above have also been 
given new names, speechd-up is now known as OSpeakup, and speechd-java is now 
known as OpenTTS-java.

Why Fork Speech Dispatcher and Related Projects?

One of the fundamental freedoms granted by the GPL is the freedom to publish 
one's modifications to the source code of a software product.  Sometimes, such 
publication takes the form of a fork, in which the modified product is 
developed separately from the original. In this case, we've chosen to make 
forks of software initially produced by the Brailcom group. We'll describe our 
reasons for doing that below.

The Brailcom group had a great idea.  They wanted to provide a system or 
user-level service to control synthetic speech.  That was Speech Dispatcher. 
They created libraries to ease the task of communicating with that service, so 
that it would be possible for programmers to speech-enable their applications , 
simply by calling output functions provided by one of these libraries.  For 
several years, Brailcom actively maintained and promoted Speech Dispatcher and 
the software associated with it. They innovated, and the community at large was 
slow to adopt.

Over time, projects within the accessibility community began to embrace Speech 
Dispatcher.  It is now the preferred speech synthesis backend of the Orca 
screenreader. The Speakup screenreader can control many software-based 
text-to-speech engines with the help of Speech Dispatcher and a small connector 
program. One advantage of that strategy is that Orca and Speakup can 
cooperatively use the same text-to-speech engine.  The key point is that many 
projects have adopted Speech Dispatcher, to a greater or lesser extent.

As time passed, the tables turned. The most recent official release of Speech 
Dispatcher was made in the summer of 2008.  The developers began taking less 
and less of a role in the project.  The source code moved from a CVS repository 
to git in 2009.  During much of that year, active development took place in a 
repository hosted by Luke Yelavich.  Mr. Yelavich even produced several 
unofficial "release candidate" versions of Speech Dispatcher. Unfortunately, 
the official release process is stalled. In an effort to clarify the current 
status of the software, members of the community contacted Brailcom. Replies to 
these requests for information were somewhat non-committal.  In effect, 
Brailcom stated that they were interested in developing Speech Dispatcher, but 
they had no current plans.

That, in short, is why we forked.  Members of the open-source accessibility 
community need and want an actively-developed speech framework. The OpenTTS 
project hopes to fulfill that need by carrying forward the vision set forth by 
Brailcom.

The OpenTTS.org website is now live, although there is not much there at the 
moment. The site will be expanded in the near future to add areas for 
documentation, and feature specification tracking, to help developers better 
outline and indicate what the next release of OpenTTS will contain. You will 
also find a link to our mailing lists, where you can discuss OpenTTS 
development.

We welcome all contributors from the community who wish to help us further 
develope the OpenTTS framework, and encourage any interested contributors to 
join the opentts-dev mailing list. To get more information on this list, or 
other lists relating to OpenTTS, please go to http://lists.opentts.org. We also 
especially welcome any Brailcom staff who wish to contribute to the project.

I plan to announce the focus for OpenTTS development over the next 6 months 
very soon, and will do so on the opentts-dev mailing list (see above), and the 
website, so please stay tuned for more information. Should you have any 
questions, please feel free to subscribe to the opentts-users mailing list, and 
ask away. Commonly asked questions will be put up on the website for all to 
read.

Finally, I'd like to thank Chris Brannon and William Hubbs for their hard work 
so far in helping get things off the ground, particularly with code cleanup and 
re-organisation. I would also like to thank all of those in the community who 
supported going ahead with the fork, you know who you are.

I sincerely hope that from here on out, we can create a text to speech 
framework that can rival those available for proprietary operating systems, as 
well as creating a framework that all application developers feel comfortable 
working with. Text to speech is important for more than just those with a 
disability, it is very useful for many other people for many different tasks. 
Lets give them a reason to want to use it.


Luke Yelavich
OpenTTS project lead.