On Jan 6, 2009, at 12:10 AM, Dalmazio Brisinda wrote:
Some good news. We've got a basic text-to-speech server operational.
Excellent news! Well done. I must to go to the repository, download the stuff & try it out. Steve N. ran out of time and never did get the PreMo (Gnuspeech) parsing stuff fully operational. In fact, AFAIR, the proper dictionary lookup wasn't even operational. I'll check back through my files and try to pin down exactly where Steve left it, but for stuff his cut down parser in Gnuspeech didn't handle he just put a raspberry noise so it was obvious.
I've extracted the required bits from Monet and placed them in their own server process using the Distributed Objects architecture, and created this server as an OS X LaunchDaemon (the recommended way). So there is now a simple Distributed Objects interface and an example client application that shows how to invoke the speech synthesis functionality programmatically. Will fill out the functionality on the server shortly though, currently only the "speak text" functionality is operational.
Also, I've created a Service for the speech synthesis functionality, so it can be accessed from any application on OS X. Just select the text in the application in question, go into the application's main menu and click Services->GnuSpeech->Speak Text. (Incidentally, Apple's own speech service is available at Services->Speech->Start Speaking Text).
I am very impressed -- this all represents some very important steps forward, and not easy ones, IMHO.
Now, I haven't done any work on the actual parser. I noticed that whenever there is punctuation in the string adjacent to the word, it treats it as a single word, and there is no entry for such a word+punctuation. It looks like this portion of the parser/filter was temporarily turned-off due to some complexity/incompatibility in the way codes were inserted into strings. I'll see if I can have a closer look at this shortly.
Might be worth dropping a note to Steve. Would you like me to contact him?
I've committed everything so far to the repository including installation instructions (README.txt) for the time being, as installation of the GNU text-to-speech server and service are not especially transparent. That is, until an automated installation process can be fashioned.
I am making progress on "Synthesizer" and hope to have something I can put on the repository reasonably soon.
Warm regards.