Re: Emacs TTS

[Tim X]

"Veli-Pekka Tätilä" <vtatila@gmailRemoveToReply.com> writes:

> harven wrote:
> [TTS]
>> Have a look at the wiki:
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacSpeak
> Too bad Speechd-el isn't mentioned. That's what I'm using:
>
Its a wiki, add it!

> http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-el#emacspeak
>
> BTW: The Emacspeak instructions are badly out of date. I haven't heard 
> anyone sucfesfully using the ViaVoice TTS for LInux in quite some time: I'm 
> on the Orca and Speechd-el lists as well as alt.comp.blind-users. Most tend 
> to use eSpeak or Festival as far as the freebies go, and Dectalk or TTSynth, 
> the same engine as in ViaVoice and Eloquence, for commercial stuff.

I think that is incorrect. There was a time a while back, when IBM
stopped making the ViaVoice available for free that people stopped using
it. However, that changed once a few places, like oralux managed to
organise a deal where they could sell ViaVoice runtime licenses for
about $50 US. At no time did emacspeak stop supporting ViaVoice
Outloud. if you were able to get a version of ViaVoice that worked under
Linux, then emacspeak supported it fine. The problem was that until a
deal was sorted out to get the runtime license at a reasonable cost, you
had to either buy the SDK (over $300US) or buy a 'bundle' of runtime
licenses (and I think you still had to buy the SDK). The issue was not
with emacspeak. I know for certain that Raman, myself and a number of
other emacspeak users are using ViaVoice Outloud. 


Emacspeak still supports the dectalk express, software
dectalk and espeak. Festival and flite are not directly supported, but
there are patches out there that do provide support (there has been work
on eflite in the last fortnight). 

I don't know if the instructions are out of date or not as I've not
needed to use them. Once you have ViaVoice installed, the procedure
for building support for it within emacspeak have not changed at all as
far as I can recall. Essentially, you just have to install extended Tcl,
go into the linux-outloud directory and type make. 

Note to the OP, this won't assist you in what you are after at all. Your
original post was about speech recognition. Neither emacspeak or speechd
provide speech recognition. They only provide text-to-speech, which is
going in the wrong direction for what you want. 

IBM did have another package called something like ViaVoice dictate or
something similar. Not sure what happened to it, but I do remember
someone posting an emacs mode to work with it quite some time ago
i.e. 98/99. If you are running under Linux, there is also the sphinx2
(??) project that was bringing speech recognition to X windows. Not
looked at it in a while, so don't know what its status is. 

So, the basic answer to your question is "Yes, it is possible to add
speech recognition, but there may not be any easy 'out of the box'
solution. You will need some additional software, possibly sphinx,
ViaVoice dictation or something else depending on your platform. It ahs
been done to some extent before, so googling may help.

HTH

Tim


Tim
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au