[Samuel Thibault] Bug#601395: speech-dispatcher: Should have a way to use svox/pico

[Kyle]

I'm currently using SVox Pico on the latest speech-dispatcher from Git. 
I'm using the native module that is included in this version rather than 
the generic config file. It's working rather well so far, with the 
exception of a couple of bugs which I'll list here, since as far as I 
know, this is probably the best place for bugs.

Long chunks of speech are not interruptable. If I use the say all 
command in Orca or page up or down through the terminal history, it 
becomes impossible to interrupt speech. Only killing and restarting 
speech-dispatcher fixes this problem, which I mapped to a keyboard 
shortcut for testing purposes and to restart things if speech stopps or 
goes dummy.

SVox Pico seems to die if too much is going on at once, e.g. when 
arrowing or tabbing through a  web page or document very quickly. This 
doesn't happen all the time, but it happens frequently enough to cause a 
problem. Once Pico dies, there is no speech, even from dummy, and only 
killing and restarting speech-dispatcher solves the problem.

The last part of a previous letter or word is spoken immediately before 
the current word or letter if speech is interrupted. This may be 
somewhat related to the bug I mentioned right before this one, but it 
does happen all the time, even if I'm not typing quickly. Read a line of 
text or type a lettor or word usingOrca and silence speech in the middle 
of the utterance. Then make speech-dispatcher speak, either using Orca 
or even using spd-say. a clip from the word or letter that was 
interrupted will always play immediately before the new utterance is spoken.

Some letters or even whole lines are not spoken. Do an aptitude search 
on an Ubuntu system from a terminal. Use orca flat review to go to the 
top of the screen and attempt to read one line at a time. Pico will 
speak some lines but will miss others. Also, if I try to spell a word 
using orca, (double-tap keypad 5), only two to three letters in the word 
are actually spoken. All other letters are ignored, and the spoken 
letters seem to be in random locations, not always at the beginning of 
the word.

Punctuation pauses in most cases are too long. Things like commas and 
periods seem to stop speech for an unusual amount of time before the 
next phrase or sentence is spoken.

To experience both the good and the bad of this rather nice synthesizer, 
you will need to run speech-dispatcher from Git source, as I'm not sure 
that the module is in the latest release. Also note that if you're 
running Orca and want it to speak using SVox Pico, you will need to 
install both Orca and speech-dispatcher in /usr/local. I tried 
installing the speech-dispatcher source package over the Ubuntu 
installation, and it refused to speak, and Orca seems to automatically 
start /usr/bin/speechd if installed in /usr/bin, bypassing the locally 
compiled version of speech-dispatcher entirely.
~Kyle