[Emacspeak] Re: Any tips on optimal audio config for emacspeak?

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

You have the right address! Welcome. You are actualy only the 3rd person
to post to this list since it moved from the old home at Vassar.

Sadly, I have no experience with running Emacspeak on a Pi. I'm not
familiar with the performance characteristics of the Pi. One thing you
could try is sending speech directly to the espeak server (via the
command line - just run ./espeak and then queue speech by typing a q
followed by some words inside { and }. Then hit 'd' to have it speak.
There is also an espeak command which comes as part of the espeak
software that you can use to turn a text file into speech. This will at
least give you and idea whether it is the TTS which is slow or something
else.

One thing I do remember is that the performance of espeak can be
improved by ensuring it is built for the correct audio interface. i.e.
Alsa or Pulse audio. Make sure you have built it for the interface you
plan to use.

I do know on other platforms, either Linux or macOS, there is little
latency and speech happens quickly. It can sometimes take a bit of time
to interrupt speech - this depends on how much has been sent to the
speech server. There is a play off between speech quality and how fast
it can be interrupted. More speech sent at once gives better quality,
but then takes longer to interrupt the speech. Shorter allows quick
interruption, but at the cost of speech quality.

A lot of people have reported that Pulse Audio has poor performance
compared to Also. I have been running pulse audio for years without any
performance problems (there were problems in the early days, but that
was a long time ago).

Both Alsa and pulse audio have a fair amount of configuration options.
On Linux, I've not needed to do any performance tuning when running on
64 bit systems for years. It is possible you may need to look into this
in order to get a configuration which is suitable for the Pi. Probably
need to ask for assistance in a Pi specific community for this as I
don't think many people run emacspeak on a Pi.

Tim

Derek Roberts <bigd.vi.guy(a)gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> Hopefully I got the address right! :)
> I'm trying to get Emacspeak working on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Arch. It
> seems like no matter what I do, audio performance just isn't quite right.
> With Alsa, there's noticeable lag when I do anything. The speech is slow to
> interrupt, icons play slowly and make the whole emacs process seem to lag.
> With Pulseaudio, the pauses between speech chunks are greatly lengthened. A
> simple comma may take a full second to be processed.
> Does anyone have tips for an optimal audio configuration? I'm guessing the
> icon slowness is just SD card performance (class 10, they said!), but what
> about the speech lag? In case it helps, I'm using latest Emacspeak from
> github/tvraman/emacspeak with the espeak server.
> ...Or should I just blow the whole thing and switch to FreeBSD? :)
>
> Thanks for your help,
> Derek
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--
Tim Cross