speech-dispatcher speech slowing down from time to time

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I have noticed this only with orca, however after some discussion on the 
orca list there seems to be a suggestion it might be a speech-dispatcher 
issue. However I have to admit I do not know whether it is a 
speech-dispatcher issue or if it is an issue with how orca uses 
speech-dispatcher, so if it is an issue with how orca uses 
speech-dispatcher let me know some details and I will report it to the 
orca developers.

What the problem is: I can be using orca and suddenly the speech will 
slow right down to an extremely slow speed. This is not caused by me 
interacting with orca as it can happen whilst using in read all mode in 
the midst of the speech output. It does not seem to be application 
specific, however it does seem to happen more frequently with Mozilla 
products (firefox and thunderbird) than with others (I don't know if 
there may be something to do with HTML in emails and web pages possibly).

I am using speech-dispatcher with espeak. I have been unable to test it 
with other output modules (I have been unable to get the flite module 
working on my system, festival seems to have issues as well and the 
IBMtts module is unusable last time I tried it due to the bug with it 
not handling priorities correctly so meaning orca speech gets truncated 
when output is sent as multiple messages).

I thought may be the very slow speed I keep encountering is the default 
speed in the speech-dispatcher configuration, so I increased that, 
however it does not seem to have increased this very slow speed.

I do not know whether the issue shows up with other speech-dispatcher 
clients, the only other one I would use is the speakup connector 
(speechd-up) but as speakup modules now fail to load on any of my 
computers I cannot even try with that.

Can anyone help with this?

Michael Whapples