Re: Emacspeak on CentOS 6.2

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The espeak server can be a little slow/sluggish compared to other
servers, such as outloud.

I personally have had the best results by downloading the espeak
sources from sourceforge and recompiling the espeak software with
pulsaudio support rather than the default on most distros of
portaudio. However, others have reported this has not worked or
improved matters.

Some have reported they have found that pulseaudio makes speech server
performance sluggish and less responsive. They tend to remove
pulseaudio and use only direct ALSA interaction. I've not found that
pulseaudio has any performance impact (it was an issue 3 or 4 years
ago, but I've found pulseaudio works fine for the last couple of
years).

Removing pulseuadio form a distribution can be challenging as many
distros build many of their sound based applications against the
pulseaudio libs. While there is normally equivaltent packages which
are linked directly to also and don't use pulse, it can still be
challenging to get the system really clean of pulseaudio.

I don't know what distribution is best. I suspect that all reasonably
recent releases are fairly equal and it really just comes down to a
matter of taste. You will find some (often subtle) differences between
distributions, especially when you move between 'families' i.e. Red
Hat versus Debian vs SUSe etc.

While I think its good to support espeak because it is actively
developed and open source, I personally tend to use both espeak and
outloud (especially since distributions like Ubuntu have made it so
easy to run 32 bit outloud on a 64 bit system). The price for outloud
is very low if you purchase it from voxin.

With espeak, I find it necessary to turn off character echo as espeak
just cannot keep up with my typing rate. I'm also working/playing with
some ideas on how to make espeak more responsive, but progress is
slow, so it is unlikely anything substantial will come out of what I'm
doing for a while yet.

HTH

Tim

On 18 April 2012 19:43, Mitko Iliev <imitko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have installed emacspeak 35.0 on CentOS 6.2 and configured to use linux-espeak (DTK_PROGRAM=espeak). I had to change a bit the Makefile in servers/linux-espeak directory to get compiled as OS has tcl 8.5 and it is compiled with success.  But  i'm getting very slow and broken speech when start emacspeak and not found a way to fix that problem. Basically after welcome message  which is pronounced fine, when positioning on some text it answer with big latency and slowly.
> Does anybody have success with using emacspeak 35.0 & espeak on CentOS 6.2 with USB sound device?
> Also is there a recommendation for Linux OS distribution (possibly latest) to be used?
>
> Thanks,
> Mitko
>
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-- 
Tim Cross

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