emacspeak + SAPI4.0 on win32

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary Bishop <gb@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    Gary> I've got emacspeak10.0 limping along on NT4.0 and
    Gary> Win98 using Emacs 20.3.1 and the Microsoft Speech
Wow --this is great to hear --congratulations!!

by   the way, aren't you the same person who wrote to me saying
you would be doing this sometime towards the start of the year?
    Gary> SDK 4.0. I've never used or heard emacspeak before
    Gary> so I have no idea how what I am hearing compares
    Gary> to the *real* thing.

    Gary> I have 2 questions:

    Gary> 1) If I configure emacspeak10.0 as shipped and try
    Gary> to run it, emacs complains that
    Gary> emacspeak-resource-directory is void. I see the
    Gary> defvar in emacspeak-setup.el but the complaint
    Gary> happens down in the load of emacspeak-pronounce.el
    Gary> that happens as a result of loading emacspeak.el
    Gary> several lines up in emacspeak-setup.el. I moved
    Gary> the defvar up in emacspeak-setup.el and that
    Gary> appears to fix it. Is this some subtle bug in
    Gary> NTemacs or did I do something else wrong?

Sounds like a subtle ntemacs quirk. 
However I do have emacspeak 10.0 loading and running without 
complaints on emacs 20.3.1 (I think --need to check the .1)
under NT.
I'll look at this again, and go ahead and move the line up
if necessary as you found.

    Gary> 2) Is there a document that interprets all the
    Gary> dectalk commands? I'm trying to puzzle out the
    Gary> meaning of the various sequences that get inserted
    Gary> into text strings. I'm guessing these are commands
    Gary> for dectalk. Perhaps they are tcl commands
    Gary> instead? I'm not using tcl at all in my
    Gary> implementation, emacspeak talks directly to my
    Gary> little app which interfaces to the SAPI. I'm
    Gary> trying to understand, for example, what was
    Gary> supposed to happen as a result of this string:

    Gary> pound [:np :dv pr 200 hr 30 sr 50 as 100 qu
    Gary> 100]ifndef [:np ] S[*] T[*] [:np :dv pr 200 hr 30
    Gary> sr 50 as 100 qu 100]R_H [:np ]

Jim Van Zandt has already sent you the Dectalk manual --that
should help.
The [..] commands are all Dectalk control sequences.
Some are standard IPA style notation [*] is a morpheme
boundary for instance.

Here is a strawmen sketch for the "right way" to handle this
for MS SAPI and other non-dectalk engines:

0) Emacspeak implements a dtk-css-speech module 
--see file dtk-css-speech.el
--this is an implementation of the necessary structures and
mappings for implementing aural CSS

1) Many of the  modules in emacspeak that were written
before dtk-css-speech got created 
use direct dtk codes in the voice definition --e.g. module
dtk-voices.el
--these should be updated to instead use dtk-css-speech
based voices.
do a grep '[:' *.el to find all the culprits
2) dtk-css-speech itself provides a css->dectalk mapping 
--that module should be split into two modules 
a) css-speech.el 
b) dtk-css-speech.el

4) Finally, for tts package xxx we can create
xxx-css-speech.el 

The above has been on my todo list for over two years,  but
I have never found the time, and am probably unlikely to do
so in the near future.

Depending on how much elisp hackery you want to sign up for,
I'd love to see this happen--
if you start it off I'll probably help as we go along.

I would not recommend some kind of ad-hock kluge that
inspects the codes emacspeak spits out and translate them
over in the speech server code--
it quickly turns into a debugging and maintainance
nightmare.

On  the choice and design of voice personalities 
the MS SAPI kit does have multiple voices, 
but they do not have as many parameters to tweak per voice.

Finally, I assume you're planning to release this thing once
built as open source --if not please let me know what your
plans are.
    Gary> currently it reads all the bracketed text to me,
    Gary> which clearly isn't what is desired.

    Gary> Thanks for any help.  gb

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-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

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