Speech Dispatcher and External Synths (COM ports) ?

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi list,
Some updates about my questions concerning Gnome accessibility under VmWare 
Server:
I read on the Web that disabling Gnome system sounds might help as there 
might be some conflict between the app managing them and Gnome-Speech. I did 
that and after some rebooting Gnopernicus appears to speak. The audio 
artifacts that prevent me from using Festival in VmWare still remain, 
however.

As a temporary solution I'm thinking of sending stuff to the virtual 
machine's serial port which is a named pipe to a Perl script driving a 
speech synth in Windows. Now the question is how do I get speech commands in 
the COM port in Gnopernicus?

I read somewhere it uses speech dispatcher which includes a generic APi for 
command-line driven speech synths. So supposedly changing my speech synth to 
some echo commands to dev/ttyS1 would do the trick. But as I'm new to Linux 
and Speech Dispatcher in particular, how to do that?

I found a sample speech dispatcher config at:

http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2006-April/038667.html

Extrapolating from that I'm going to try something like the following. Does 
this look OK?

GenericExecuteSynth  "echo \"$RATE $VOLUME $DATA\" >dev/ttyS1"
AddVoice "en" "generic"      "en"
GenericLanguage "en" "english"

I'm thinking of supporting speed and volume but other than that I'd be very 
happy to get even a single SAPI 5 voice speaking this way, as a proof of 
concept.

Step by step instructions as to where in Ubuntu speech dispatcher config 
files go, how they should be named and so on would be appreciated. I can use 
the console via my WIndows terminal emu but am not very comfortable with it. 
That is I have annoying buffering issues with my virtual serial port and 
auto-completion does nothing. But these are windows issues. Additionally, i 
found that I don't seem to be able to get super user privileges with su. 
However, if I use GNome and then enter the same password as for my ordinary 
user account, apps like Synaptic let me in without complaints. Odd. It's 
probably me missing some Ubuntu fundamentals again. BTW: I've read the 
Ubuntu Accessibility Wiki.

Frankly speaking, currently Gnome is a pain to use with full-screen 
magnification alone. I'm primarily a speech user as I said but have a bit of 
a hen  and egg situation in the sense that it's hard to do proper 
troubleshooting or read manuals off-line before the access aids are working.

Well hope someone can help me with this.
This time I haven't got so many questions and the mail isn't awfully long 
either.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/