Re: [PATCH 0/2] Add eSpeak

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 12:58:12AM -0500, Leo Famulari wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 12:26:37AM -0500, Leo Famulari wrote:
> > These patches provide the eSpeak software speech synthesizer [0].
> 
> I realized that the espeak upstream has gone inactive [0] and the users have
> forked the project as espeak-ng: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/
> 
> The impression I get from the espeak ML is that the fork is merging a
> lot of third-party patches that improve support for different languages,
> as well as cleaning up the C codebase. So, in the future we should probably
> package espeak-ng as well, for the sake of users that need speech
> synthesis. It will conflict with espeak since the output binaries have
> the same names.

Or perhaps it will not conflict. I'm not sure. It's early days for
espeak-ng.

> 
> There is also the espeakedit program that allows phoneme-editing. That
> should be packaged, too.
> 
> [0] Read the last few months of their ML:
> http://sourceforge.net/p/espeak/mailman/espeak-general/
> 
> > 
> > I need advice on what audio system to configure it to use.
> > 
> > This patch configures it to use PulseAudio if it is available, and to
> > use PortAudio otherwise. Of course, since I have included PulseAudio as
> > an input, PulseAudio is always available and it starts a PulseAudio
> > server if one is not running [1].
> > 
> > The other option is to use only PortAudio (tested and works for me).
> > 
> > I guess the factors are:
> > 1) Does GuixSD have a default audio setup that we should target? If
> > GuixSD uses PulseAudio, then I think it would be good for eSpeak to be
> > integrated into that sytem.
> > 2) Does this package, which launches PulseAudio, work for anyone on a
> > foreign distro?
> > 
> > Can GuixSD users with audio please test it out? As well as users on
> > foreign distros? You can do so like this:
> > `espeak 'hello world'`
> > 
> > [0]
> > http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
> > 
> > [1] This is actually not the expected behaviour and I am going to file a
> > bug. The Makefile reads "'runtime' uses pulseaudio if it is running,
> > else uses portaudio". Instead, it starts PulseAudio on demand.
> > 
> > Leo Famulari (2):
> >   gnu: Add sonic.
> >   gnu: Add espeak.
> > 
> >  gnu/packages/audio.scm | 86 
> > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> >  1 file changed, 86 insertions(+)
> > 
> > -- 
> > 2.6.4
> > 
> > 
>