Re: Software Speech (Re: ibm tts run-time engine purchasing alternatives)

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I still see a reasonable number of crashes - far less than with the
software dectalk and probably about the same as the old ViaVoice I was
using prior to the c++ library changes (was that version 4.
something?). 

funny enough, I seem to have been getting fewer crashes with the OSS
emulation layer than with the direct ALSA supported version, though
that is a bit subjective and I really need to quantify that.

For me, the crashes seem to occur if I'm moving the cursor around very
quickly and speech is getting interrupted - I've not noticed any
difference when other sound streams are being processed. However I'm
using the SB Live sound card on both the systems I'm running on.

Tim

T. V. Raman writes:
 > 
 > ViaVoice does not have a native x86_64 version --- but the 32 bit
 > version on my AMD64 is very stable.
 > 
 > Most of the crashes you are seeing -- both the  older ViaVoice
 > and Software Dectalk are a result of their writing directly to
 > the audio device using OSS. 
 > 
 > 
 > Emacspeak Viavoice servers have   avoided this by getting wave
 > output back in memory and handling it cleanly -- and with the
 > ALSA support, the crashes are mostly gone --- I still see a few
 > restarts on my laptop when there are multiple channels of audio
 > happening in parallel.
 > 
 > >>>>> "Jason" == Jason White <jasonw@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
 >     Jason> Along similar lines, I've managed to set up software
 >     Jason> DECTALK 4.61 with 32-bit versions of tcl and all
 >     Jason> necessary libraries to run on my AMD64 laptop. It
 >     Jason> isn't very reliable, however, and crashes quite
 >     Jason> unpredictably. Until I upgraded the kernel to use
 >     Jason> udev, one symptom of the problems was that the
 >     Jason> permissions on /dev/audio would somehow be changed to
 >     Jason> exclude write access whenever a crash happened, so
 >     Jason> I'de have to become root and fix it before restarting
 >     Jason> the speech server.
 >     Jason> 
 >     Jason> After the kernel upgrade, the system now uses udev
 >     Jason> rather than devfs for device management and
 >     Jason> consequently, for some reason, the permission problem
 >     Jason> is gone, though unfortunately not the crashes
 >     Jason> themselves.
 >     Jason> 
 >     Jason> On campus I now have access to a braille display, thus
 >     Jason> the speech problems are more of an annoyance than a
 >     Jason> major obstacle: I just bring in my laptop, connect the
 >     Jason> braille display and get work done. I'll probably try
 >     Jason> ViaVoice when it becomes available, especially if they
 >     Jason> have a native x86_64 version.
 >     Jason> 
 >     Jason> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 > 
 > -- 
 > Best Regards,
 > --raman
 > 
 >       
 > Email:  raman@xxxxxxxxxxx
 > WWW:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/
 > AIM:    emacspeak       GTalk: tv.raman.tv@xxxxxxxxxxx
 > PGP:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/raman-almaden.asc
 > Google: tv+raman 
 > 
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