[orca-list] Plans for Speech Dispatcher

[Jeremy Whiting]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 4:30 AM, Hynek Hanke <hanke at brailcom.org> wrote:

> On 30.6.2010 03:57, Michael Pozhidaev wrote:
>
>> 2) After the release of 0.7.1, we plan to start working on
>>> two major improvements for the 0.8 release: DBUS interface
>>> and closer session integration using such technologies
>>>
>>>
>> Will D-Bus interface be respondable only for control operations
>> (stop server, etc) or there will be D-Bus interface to sent speech
>> commands?
>>
>
> It will be used in both cases.
>
>  It seems to me the second  may be amazing idea. It can be the
>> simplest way to produce speech output from any place you want. But one
>> important thing: if spd will  process commands to say any text and stop
>> output with D-Bus it would be great to initiate public discussion to get
>> some common interfaces for TTS engines accessible with D-BUS. Every TTS
>> provider (kttsd, for example) may be interested in such interfaces
>> research. Apparently, using common interfaces increases
>> interchangebility between TTS engines
>>
>
> Yes, this is a good note, although a little imprecise. Neither
> Speech Dispatcher nor OpenTTS or KTTSD are TTS engines,
> they are just high level interfaces to them. KTTSD actually has plans
> to make Speech Dispatcher it's default interface and drop it's
> own engines or port them to Speech Dispatcher. Only problem
> is there is noone to implement it.
>

Hynek,

KTTSD switched to wrapping speech-dispatcher a year ago.  I was in
discussion with you a lot at the time.  Maybe you forgot? :p  I admit it's
not the best wrapper at the moment (there are some usability bugs on my end)
but it works and is getting better. KTTSD (now renamed to Jovie) itself
provides a dbus interface for apps to use, and has some filtering abilities,
otherwise it is not much more than a wrapper around speech-dispatcher.

regards,
Jeremy


> I agree it would be good to have a common DBUS API, both between
> the different providers (Speech Dispatcher, OpenTTS and KTTSD)
> and inside the providers themselves (between client and server, between
> server and modules, hopefully once also between modules and TTS
> engines themselves). Whether the various sides will join the effort
> we can't forsee, but we can hope.
>
> Steps have partly already been taken towards this API under the name
> of TTS API: http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api . Developers from
> various sides have participated, both Gnome and KDE, and Brailcom
> has put in our knowledge and experiences and known limitations
> from the current SSIP protocol.
>
> TTS API partly overlaps with SSIP (current Speech Dispatcher
> protocol), but defines just the part important to TTS, not the part
> important to message dispatching (clients management, priorities etc),
> which is yet to be defined.
>
> The new DBUS API should be based on TTS API, so that it respects
> the conclusions reached so far with regards to management of the
> TTS engines and allow extensibility to eventually cover the full range
> of TTS API functionality. It will in the first instance however only
> implement the functionality covered by the existing SSIP protocol
> and already implemented in Speech Dispatcher.
>
> We also have a partly completed fuller implementation of TTS API
> under the name of TTS API Provider, but we will not switch to it now
> as considerable work still remains to be done and the new
> implementation must be well tested first. Also, several things
> have changed since we have last been working on it, so that
> must be reworked.
>  http://cvs.freebsoft.org/doc/tts-api-provider/tts-api-provider.html
>
> I think it is important that we advanced in smaller well-defined
> and manageable steps, but in such a way that all this work can
> be put together eventually.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Hynek Hanke
> Brailcom, o.p.s.
>
>
>
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> Speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
> http://lists.freebsoft.org/mailman/listinfo/speechd
>
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