Speech Dispatcher 0.7.1 Released

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.7.1
===============

We are happy to announce the availability of Speech Dispatcher 0.7.1
developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft project. Please read `NOTES' bellow.

Download at:
     
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.7.1.tar.gz

* What is new in 0.7.1?

  * Easy configuration of the client communication method using a single
    environment variable SPEECHD_ADDRESS.

  * Advanced autospawn -- server is autostarted only when its communication
    channel matches the communication channels requested by the client.
    Local server is not started  when client attempts to connect to a 
remote
    server.

  * Both libspeechd and python library now report a detailed error 
information
    in case of connection failure (why has connect failed, why was it not
    possible to autostart the server, what has the server reported etc.)
    Clients can directly show this information to the user and the user
    doesn't have to search them in logfiles.

  * Improvements in memory usage

  * Cleanup of priorities of messages in logging output

  * Various bugfixes, cleanups and fine-tunnings

We are thankful to the many developers who have contributed
to this release.

NOTES:

  * There are changes in the configuration file, it is recommended
    to replace your configuration with the new version

  * Common Lisp and Guile convenience libraries do not support the socket
     communication method in this release

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

   Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
   synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
   synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
   of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
   is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
   to speech synthesis.

   Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

   - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
     connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
     and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

   - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers so
     that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
     synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
     and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS and others are supported.
     Festival is an advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting
     various languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual
     synthesizer.

   - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
     shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interface. An Elisp
     and Java libraries are developed as separate projects speechd-el
     and speechd-java. Possibly an interface to any other language can
     be developed.

For more information, please visit our website:
http://www.freebsoft.org