Re: Latest on Read Etexts and espeak

[James Simmons]

Tony,

I did some more work on Read Etexts this weekend and have published a 
bundle for version 8 on the Wiki.  I think that this, along with the 
instructions I provided for installing speech-dispatcher, should meet 
your needs.  If it does, tell your friends, if not, tell me.

A fellow named Alesky Lim who is working on the Sugar on a Stick project 
created a patch to add a Play/Pause button to the Speech tab.  His patch 
also refactored much of my code and introduced some bugs, which I was 
able to fix.  The new button makes it more obvious how to stop and start 
speech, and the checkmark button is still available for when the XO is 
in its ebook reader configuration.

I created new .po files for i18n.  The originals I had were just copies 
of the ones the original Read activity had.  I never tried to test them, 
and they would not have worked if I had.  I had assumed that i18n worked 
like the resource bundles in Java do, but they are a bit more complex 
than that.  I'm trying to get my stuff into pootle so all the strings 
can be translated.  I want to create a .po file for Nepali too, but I 
don't know the two character language code for that language.  When I 
figure it out I'll add it.

The problem with speech-dispatcher typing up /dev/dsp turned out to be 
an mplayer problem, not a speech-dispatcher problem.  I always compile 
mplayer from source so I can play every available codec, and while I 
compiled in support for ALSA in fact it defaults to using OSS, which it 
cannot do while speech-dispatcher is running.  If I try to force alsa 
with the -ao option it doesn't report any conflict but no sound comes 
out of the speakers.  Same thing if I compile in pulse-audio support and 
use that.  Maybe the problem is that I have more than one sound card 
installed.  In any case, what ever it is is not a speech-dispatcher 
problem and the XO should not be affected.

James Simmons


Tony Anderson wrote:
 James,

 I appreciate your work. It sounds like you are making great progress. 
 As  I understand the dispatcher, it acts as a daemon to allow multiple 
 applications to share espeak. I also hope it is not taking over the 
 sound channel completely.

 I am getting ready (read panic) for my trip to Nepal (leaving Monday 
 afternoon). I will be able to concentrate more on this when I get 
 there toward the end of next week.

 Tony

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Latest on Read Etexts and espeak

[James Simmons]

Tony,

It looks like every day I make some progress.  I finally figured out 
that the reason text to speech was not pausing between sentences and 
paragraphs was that I was stripping all the punctuation out of the text 
before sending it on to espeak.  I have to create an XML document marked 
up with SSIP tags and pass that to speech-dispatcher instead of the raw 
text.  The reason for this is that SD needs these tags so it can do a 
callback into my code before it speaks a word.  That's the only way I 
can do word highlighting.  In the process of creating this marked up 
page I stripped out all the punctuation.  Even my wife thought that was 
a stupid thing to do.

My highlighting still sometimes lags behind the words being spoken, 
especially when there is a string of short words.  It tends to catch up 
on the longer words.  I'm going to try to make the code that highlights 
the words more efficient.  It may be doing some things it doesn't need 
to do.

This morning I noticed that if speech-dispatcher -d is running then 
mplayer can't open /dev/dsp so I don't get any sound when I play a 
movie.  spd-say continues to work.  I don't know if this is an SD 
problem or an mplayer problem.  I hope this doesn't mean that if we use 
SD on the XO then Tam Tam doesn't work.  I have posted a question to the 
SD mailing list on this.

I should have a much improved Read Etexts published in the usual place 
some time this weekend.

Thanks,

James Simmons



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