Emacspeak discussion list

[Victor Tsaran <vtsaran AT gmail.com>]

THanks John.

Makes sense!

Incremental search usually saves me in such situations! For some reason, I just have not seen it as an issue. But thanks for an interesting take!

On Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 12:48 PM Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com> wrote:

I could be missing something, but as I see it, what voice indexing would
provide is for the ability to have a 'voice cursor' (which may or may
not be the same as your emacs cursor) tracking of location where the TTS
engine is up to when generating speech from the submitted text.

The would, for example, enable for the pausing and then subsequent
resuming of speech whereby the resumed speech would start from where the
speech was previously paused. In some systems, this is very important
becasue the system only sends large chunks of speech at a time. For
example, I've seen a simple TTS interface for reading files where it
will just start reading the file. You odn't have the ability to ask for
just a page, paragraph, sentence, line, word. You just ask for it to
start speaking and then yuou can pause and resume speech. The other
thing you may get is cursor tracking of speech. A cursor might move
through the text as it is spoken so that when you pause speech, the
cursor is at that point in yhour text. This can be useful for people who
want to read  along with the speech i.e. the speech is an aid to visual
reading.

While I can see the potential benefits in having the ability to get and
use speech index information, I've not found it very high on my wishlist
for emacspeak. This is primarily because emacspeak provides very fined
grained control over the size or chunks of speech I send at a
time. Depending on what I'm doing, I'll read/browse the data using a
movement/chank size which suits my need. For example, I'f I have a large
buffer of text I want to read, I'm unlikely to ask emacspeak to just
read the whole buffer. Instead, I'm more likely to as it to read by
page, paragraph or perhaps sentence.

With emacspeak, I find it is very much about moving around using the
unit (letter, word, sentence, paragraph, page, buffer) best sutied for
what I'm doing. I find this provides an adequate balance between my use
case and complexity/consistency across speech servers. This has also
enabled me to experiment with different TTS engines. For example, many
years ago, I wrote speech servers for the Cepstral TTS engines. These
were a commercial TTS engine that at the time, had high quality
voices. The additional complexity and overheads involved in a TTS
interface model which supported voice indexing would likely hav made
this much harder to implement and discouraged the type of experimentation
which is at the heart of emacspeak. Likewise, I wonder if we would have
had the other TTS engines, some of which have come and gone, like the
flite and festival servers or the server written in C, or the existing
mac, swiftmac servers or the experimental windows, speech-dispatcher and
JS servers that are out there currently in various stages of
development.

I personally don't see the amount of required effort justifyhing the
benefits given we already have the capability to work with varying
chunks of speech. Yes, it would provide some convenience, but at a high
cost which I feel is hard to justify. However, provided someone can
implement something which does not require changes to the existing
servers or their design, I would say go for it. A lot can be learnt from
implementing a TTS server. In fact, I've learnt a lot from failed
attempts to implement TTS servers as there is a considerable amount of
subtle and non-obvious aspects to a TTS server which only become clear
when you try implementing one, making it a great learning experience. At
least it was for me.


Victor Tsaran <vtsaran AT gmail.com> writes:

> I guess, the question stands: what user-facing problem are we trying to solve?
>
> On Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 3:14 AM Parham Doustdar <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> wrote:
>
>  That's true, Emacspeak doesn't currently "read" from the speech server process as far as I've seen, it only "writes" to it.
>  Fixing that isn't impossible, but definitely time consuming.
>  The other concrete issue is that last time I checked, console screen readers read all the text in one chunk. They don't use the
>  audio CSS (forgive me if I don't use the correct name here) that Emacspeak has, which requires you to play audio icons,
>  speak text with different pitch, and pauses. All of this means that you have to do extra heavy-lifting to really track the index,
>  because the index you get back from the TTS engine isn't simply a position in the buffer -- it is just the position in the
>  current chunk of text it has recently received.
>  So that's why I'm curious if we really think it's worth it. It could be, or not, I'm not opinionated, but I'm also realizing that in
>  our community, we don't really have a good mechanism to discuss and decide on things like this.
>
>  On Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 8:35 AM Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  You are overlooking one critical component which explains why adding
>  indxing support is a non-trivial exercise which would require a complete
>  redesign of the existing TTS interface model.
>
>  For indexing information to be of any use, it has to be fed back into the
>  client and used by the client. For example, tell the client to
>  update/move the cursor to the last position spoken.
>
>  There is absolutely no support for this data to be fed back into the
>  current system. The current TTS interface has data flowing in only one
>  direction, from emacs to emacpseak and from emacspeak to the TTS server
>  and form the tts server to the tts synthesizer. There is no existing
>  mechanism to feed information (i.e. index positions) back from the TTS
>  engine to emacs. While getting this information from the TTS engine into
>  the TTS server is probably reasonably easy, there is no existing channel
>  to feed that information up into Emacspeak.
>
>  Not only would it be necessary to define and implement a whole new model
>  to incorporate this feedback, in addition to also working with TTS
>  engines which do not provide indexing information, you would also likely
>  need to implement some sort of multi speech cursor tracking so that the
>  system can track cursor positions in different buffers.
>
>  The reason this sort of functionality seems easy in systems like speakup
>  or speech-dispatcher is because those systems were designed with this
>  functionality. It is incprporated into the base design and part of the
>  various communication protocols the design implement. Adding this
>  functionality is not something which can just be 'tacked on'.
>
>  The good news of course is that being open source, anyone can go ahead
>  and define a new interface model and add indexing capability. However,
>  it may be worth considering that it has taken 30 years of development to
>  get the current model to where it is at, so I think you can expect a
>  pretty steep climb initially!
>
>  John Covici <covici AT ccs.covici.com> writes:
>
>  > Its a lot simpler -- indexing is supposed to simply arrange things so
>  > that when reading a buffer, and you stop reading, the cursor will be
>  > at or near the point where you stopped.  Speakup has had this for a
>  > long time and that is why I use it on Linux.  But its only good for
>  > the virtual console.  Now speech dispatcher has indexinng built in, so
>  > if you connect to that and use one of the supported synthesizers,
>  > indexing works correctly and I don't see any performance hit.  I think
>  > all the client has to do is connect to speech dispatcher, but check me
>  > on this.
>  >
>  > On Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:25:27 -0400,
>  > Robert Melton wrote:
>  >>
>  >> Is indexing supposed to be like per reading block, or like one global?  Is the idea
>  >> that you can be reading a buffer, go to another buffer, read some of it, then come
>  >> back and continue? IE: Index per "reading block"?
>  >>
>  >> Assuming it is global for simplicity, it is still a heavy lift for implementation on
>  >> Mac and Windows.
>  >>
>  >> As they do not natively report back as words are spoken, now
>  >> you can get this behavior at an "Utterance" level, by installing hooks and callbacks
>  >> and tracking those. With that you would need to additionally keep copies of the future
>  >> utterances, even if they already where queued with the TTS.
>  >>
>  >> Considered from the POV of index per reading block, then you need to find ways to ident
>  >> each one and its position and index them and continue reading.
>  >>
>  >> Sounds neat, but at least for my servers, right now, the juice isn't worth the sqeeze, I
>  >> am still trying to get basic stuff like pitch multipliers working on windows via wave
>  >> mangling and other basic features, hehe.
>  >>
>  >> > On Apr 8, 2024, at 05:20, Parham Doustdar <parham90 AT gmail.com> wrote:
>  >> >
>  >> > I understand. My question isn't whether it's possible though, or how difficult it
>  >> > would be, or the steps we'd have to take to implement it.
>  >> > My question is more about whether the use cases we have today make it worth it to
>  >> > reconsider. All other questions we can apply the wisdom of the community to solve, if
>  >> > we were convinced that the effort would be worth it.
>  >> > For me, the way I've got around this is to use the next/previous paragraph
>  >> > commands. The chunks are good small enough that I can "zoom in" if I want, and yet
>  >> > large enough that I don't have to constantly hit next-line.
>  >> > Sent from my iPhone
>  >> >
>  >> >> On 8 Apr 2024, at 11:13, Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com> wrote:
>  >> >>
>  >> >> 
>  >> >> This is extremely unlikely to be implemented. It is non-trivial and
>  >> >> would require a significant re-design of the whole interface and model
>  >> >> of operation. It isn't as simple as just getting index information from
>  >> >> the TTS servers which support it. That information has to then be fed
>  >> >> backwards to Emacs through some mechanism which currently does not
>  >> >> exist and would result in a far more complicated interface/model.
>  >> >>
>  >> >> As Raman said, the decision not to have this was not simply an oversight
>  >> >> or due to lack of time. It was a conscious design decision. What your
>  >> >> asking for isn't simply an enhancement, it is a complete redesign of the
>  >> >> TTS interface model.
>  >> >>
>  >> >> "Parham Doustdar" (via emacspeak Mailing List) <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> writes:
>  >> >>
>  >> >>> I agree. I'm not sure which TTS engines support it. Maybe, just like notification streams
>  >> >>> are supported in some servers, we can implement this feature for engines that support it?
>  >> >>> Sent from my iPhone
>  >> >>>
>  >> >>>>> On 8 Apr 2024, at 10:24, John Covici <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> wrote:
>  >> >>>>
>  >> >>>> I know this might be contraversial, but, indexing would be very useful
>  >> >>>> to me,  sometimes I read long buffers and when I stop the reading, the
>  >> >>>> cursor is still where I started, so no real  way to do this adequately
>  >> >>>> -- I would not mind if it were just down to the line, rather than
>  >> >>>> individual words, but it would make emacspeak lots nicer for me.
>  >> >>>>
>  >> >>>>> On Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:39:15 -0400,
>  >> >>>>> "T.V Raman" (via emacspeak Mailing List) wrote:
>  >> >>>>>
>  >> >>>>> [1  <text/plain; us-ascii (7bit)>]
>  >> >>>>> as a single call is that it ensures  atomicity i.e. all of the state
>  >> >>>>> gets set at one shot from the perspective of the elisp layer, so you
>  >> >>>>> hopefully never get TTS that has its state  partially set.
>  >> >>>>> note that the other primary benefit of tts_sync_state
>  >> >>>>>
>  >> >>>>> Robert Melton writes:
>  >> >>>>>> On threading. It is all concurrent, lots of fun protecting of the state.
>  >> >>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>> On language and voice, I was thinking of them as a tree, language/voice,
>  >> >>>>>> as this is how Windows and MacOS seem to provide them.
>  >> >>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>> ----
>  >> >>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>> Oh, one last thing. Should TTS Server implementations be returning a \n
>  >> >>>>>> after command is complete, or is just returning nothing acceptable?
>  >> >>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>> On Apr 5, 2024, at 14:01, T.V Raman <raman AT google.com> wrote:
>  >> >>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>> And do spend some time thinking of atomicity and multithreaded systems,
>  >> >>>>>>> e.g. ask yourself the question "how many threads of execution are active
>  >> >>>>>>> at any given time"; Hint: the answer isn't as simple as "just one
>  >> >>>>>>> because my server doesn't use threads". > Raman--
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>> Thanks so much, that clarifies a bunch. A few questions on the
>  >> >>>>>>>> language / voice support.
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>> Does the TTS server maintain an internal list and switch through
>  >> >>>>>>>> it or does it send the list the lisp in a way I have missed?
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>> Would it be useful to have a similar feature for voices, being
>  >> >>>>>>>> first you pick right language, then you pick preferred voice
>  >> >>>>>>>> then maybe it is stored in a defcustom and sent next time as
>  >> >>>>>>>> (set_lang lang:voice t)
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>>> On Apr 5, 2024, at 13:10, T.V Raman <raman AT google.com> wrote:
>  >> >>>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>>> If your TTS supports more than one language, the TTS API exposes these
>  >> >>>>>>>>> as a list; these calls loop through the list (dectalk,espeak, outloud)
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>> --
>  >> >>>>>>>> Robert "robertmeta" Melton
>  >> >>>>>>>> lists AT robertmelton.com
>  >> >>>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>>
>  >> >>>>>> --
>  >> >>>>>> Robert "robertmeta" Melton
>  >> >>>>>> lists AT robertmelton.com
>  >> >>>>>
>  >> >>>>> --
>  >> >>>>> [2  <text/plain; UTF-8 (8bit)>]
>  >> >>>>> Emacspeak discussion list -- emacspeak AT emacspeak.net
>  >> >>>>> To unsubscribe send email to:
>  >> >>>>> emacspeak-request AT emacspeak.net with a subject of: unsubscribe
>  >> >>>>
>  >> >>>> --
>  >> >>>> Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
>  >> >>>> How do
>  >> >>>> you spend it?
>  >> >>>>
>  >> >>>>       John Covici wb2una
>  >> >>>>       covici AT ccs.covici.com
>  >> >>>> Emacspeak discussion list -- emacspeak AT emacspeak.net
>  >> >>>> To unsubscribe send email to:
>  >> >>>> emacspeak-request AT emacspeak.net with a subject of: unsubscribe
>  >> >>>
>  >> >>> Emacspeak discussion list -- emacspeak AT emacspeak.net
>  >> >>> To unsubscribe send email to:
>  >> >>> emacspeak-request AT emacspeak.net with a subject of: unsubscribe
>  >>
>  >> --
>  >> Robert "robertmeta" Melton
>  >> lists AT robertmelton.com
>  >>
>  >>
>
>  Emacspeak discussion list -- emacspeak AT emacspeak.net
>  To unsubscribe send email to:
>  emacspeak-request AT emacspeak.net with a subject of: unsubscribe

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