Re: emacspeak 24 and dectalk software

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

NIDHAL writes:
 > Hello,
 > 
 > On 5/15/2006 at 10:47 AM Jason White wrote:
 > 
 > >On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 07:48:17PM +0200, NIDHAL
 > wrote:
 > >> For example, dectalk crashes in sevral cases and
 > stop talking. In
 > >adition,
 > >> the response time is very high.
 > >On my laptop running DECTALK 4.61 I experience
 > software crashes but not the
 > >slow response time that you report.
 > What distribution do you are runing ? are there some
 > tips to lighten the synth ? i am using it with
 > speech-dispatcher and it works fine except that i can
 > not switch between French and English.
 > >My solution will be to move to IBM TTS
 > >(aka ViaVoice) when the latest version becomes
 > available from Capital
 > >Accessibility or another suitable source.

The softwre dectalk doesn't handle some of the in-line commands very
well. This makes it very unstable due to emacspeak's use of these
commands for voice locking and other text to speech transformations. 

I modified the dtk-soft script to remove some of these and it became a
lot more stable. At one stage, I was running a version which didn't
use in-line dectalk commands at all and it rarely crashed. The
modified version I use to run still has some of the in-line commands
because I like the voice locking of emacspeak. 

You can get my hacked version from
http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~tcross

but be advised your on your own with it as I don't run software
dectalk anymore. 

I think you mentioned you were running Debian. I ran the software
dectalk on a 1Gz system and it was very responsive. However, that was
back with kernel 2.4.x and using OSS rather than Alsa. I've noticed
that OSS native TTS engines do seem a little sluggish if being used
under Alsa with the OSS emulation layer. If you are running Alsa, this
could explain the sluggishness of the software dectalk. You could try
switching to OSS and see if it is more responsive - I believe it is
fairly easy to switch between sound driver subsystems under Debian -
from memory, its the linux-sound-base package which has a script to
choose which sound infrastructure you use. 

Tim

Tim


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