Hi, I recently stumbled upon the old 2007 FreeDOS technote (Dietmar Segbert) talking about eSpeak (GPLv3):
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/231.html http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ http://www.braillnet.cz/~rehak/soft/sox12dos.zip http://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/12.18.2/ http://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/ http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=9635 In my own naive way, I had wondered about why someone didn't just do this already (generate .WAV from text). I'm not entirely sure of the full functionality and what else is supported, didn't look too hard, but the basic interesting part (to me) was the .WAV output. So, in effect, you generate a .WAV from a text file and then play that with whatever player. (Of course, DOS sound drivers are lacking pretty badly, and Mpxplay does *not* work on this particular [new] Intel HDA soundcard, which sucks. Hence we're almost back to using PC speaker / PIT for digital .WAV playback, heh. Oh well, better than nothing.) Long story short: it seems to work, but only compiles with older version. For whatever reason, latest sources don't compile with DJGPP anymore (at least not for me), so I didn't even bother investigating, just grabbed old srcs (1.30 was as close to technote, so I figured that was safe). 1). follow the directions to copy two files and compile with DJGPP (G++) 2). cd src\.. (so it can find "espeak-data\") 3). speak -v de -f test.txt -w test.wav ("de" means default voice, not German, heheh) 4). use some .WAV player (Mpxplay, SBplay, LXVOX, etc.) It more or less works, not perfect, but close enough! ;-) Reminds me of Dr. Sbaitso (anyone remember that?) Summary: = .WAV generation works (at least 1.30) and is fairly universal (easy to get playback) = (lack of) soundcard support sucks, but I know of several .WAV players, even for PC speaker (!) = might need to tweak the .WAV output (mixing, volume, bitrate) with SoX or similar (which only has "old" 12.x version for DOS, but presumably works) = Jim, should these be mirrored on iBiblio? eSpeak? SoX? some open source .WAV player for PC speaker? P.S. Travis, this was not meant to detract from your project in any way, so please feel free to continue your efforts (esp. since I don't know the inherent advantages of Provox). On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 9:29 PM, Travis Siegel <[email protected]> wrote: > > The provox screen reader for dos which I would like to have added to > the freedos ftp site is currently located at .... > The program currently only works with hardware synthesizers (since > there weren't any software synths for dos. However, since finding > one of these devices is relatively easy, since most folks who have > them no longer use them with a few exceptions such as myself and a > couple others I'm aware of, this shouldn't be a show stopper. > If a software synth could be developed, provox could easily be > extended to support such a synth, though I doubt such a program would > be useful, because of the amount of memory it would require, and > under dos, that's generally not practical. > So, If there are any other folks on list who use screen readers under > dos, feel free to grab this one and give it a try. > Adding additional synths is (relatively) simple, so if anyone has one > that isn't supported other than artic synths, I'm already working on > those, I'd be happy to try to add them. > Of course, artic synths can already be made to work by using either > the porttalk or accent sa options, but both modes lack some useful > features supported directly by the artic synthesizers themselves. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA The must-attend event for mobile developers. Connect with experts. Get tools for creating Super Apps. See the latest technologies. Sessions, hands-on labs, demos & much more. Register early & save! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-blackberry-1 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
