Speech Dispatcher 0.7 Beta -- Please help with testing

[Hynek Hanke]

Dear all,

we are preparing a new release of Speech Dispatcher, which
brings significant improvements, particularly in audio output,
stability, security, easier installation and closer integration
into the system.

We would like to ask you to help us with testing and report
any issues so that we can fix them before the final release.

You can find the 0.7 Beta version here:
   
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.7-beta.tar.gz

This release is based on the great work done in the unofficial
development branch managed by Luke Yelavich, but some parts
needed to be reworked before an official release to ensure a cleaner
design, conformance to standards and smoother interoperability with
the rest of the system; the new changes were also documented etc.

Most important improvements in this release:

* Speech Dispatcher uses UNIX style sockets as default means
  of communication, thus avoiding the necessity to choose a numeric
  port and greatly easying session integration. Inet sockets are however
  still supported for communication over network.

 * Autospawn -- server is started automatically when a client requests it
   It can be forbidden in the appropriate server configuration file.

 * Pulse Audio output reworked and fixed

 * Dispatcher runs as user service (not system service) by default
   and doesn't require the previous presence of ~/.speech-dispatcher
   directory

 * All logging is now managed centrally, not by separate options

 * Graceful audio fallback (e.g. if Pulse is not working, use Alsa...)

 * Various bugfixes and fine-tunnings

 * Updated documentation

For more detailed description of the changes, please see the Git log:
      http://git.freebsoft.org/?p=speechd.git 
<http://git.freebsoft.org/?p=speechd.git>

The documentation can be found in the doc/ directory of the .tar.gz package.

With Best regards,
Hynek Hanke
Brailcom, o.p.s.