Improving Dectalk Express responsiveness

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thats very odd. I use a dectalk express at work and its very
responsive. Unfortunately I'm on leave at the moment and cannot verify
what firmware version I'm running. However, if its responsive when
running speakup, I doubt its a firmware version issue - the dectalk
knows nothing about speakup or emacspeak - it just recieves input
fromt he serial port. One possible exception could be if it is the
"in-line" commands that change various speech parameters. I'm assuming
speakup uses a fairly generic "dumbed down" interface to allow support
for multiple synthesizers and doesn't use the full range of features
that emacspeak uses. I guess It is possible that this could delay output if
there was some sort of bug in the firmware. 

It is not too difficult to modify the tcl-dtk script to remove a lot
of the in-line commands from the output. You could try that and see if
that makes a difference to responsiveness. If it does, then that would
lend more support to the possibility its in-line commands which are
causingt the problem and that it is possibly a firmware issue. 

I would also be checking things like the stty settings being used and
possible serial port contention, especially if both speakup and
emacspeak are loaded at the same time. 

Tim

Tyler Spivey writes:
 > What is the best firmware to be using with the Dectalk Express? I hear
 > there was a version 4.3, but I can't find it for the life of me. I'm
 > using 4.2CD, since I don't want to upgrade to 4.61 which sounds
 > terrible. As it stands, under Emacspeak 22.0, pressing a key, for
 > example up arrow, presents about a half-second lag while the dectalk
 > processes all the comands before the "beginning of buffer" is spoken.
 > same with the different voices in voice lock mode, weather it's enabled
 > or not. Is there anything I can do to speed this up a bit? I've used
 > speakup on a daily basis and it's not nearly this unresponsive.
 > 
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