Speech Dispatcher 0.6.5 released

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.6.5
=====================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of 
Speech Dispatcher 0.6.5 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft project. 
This is a minor release, it contains mostly bugfixes and minor 
improvements. Please read `What is new' and `NOTES' bellow.

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

   Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
   synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
   synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
   of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
   is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
   to speech synthesis.

   Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

   - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
     connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
     and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

   - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers
     so that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
     synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
     and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS are supported. Festival
     is an advanced Free Software synthesizer supporting various
     languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual synthesizer.

   - Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
     settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.

   - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
     shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interface. An Elisp
     library is developed as a sperate project speechd-el. Possibly
     an interface to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.6.5?

  - Pulse Audio output module (thanks to Gilles Casse)

  - Speech Dispatcher is now adapted for easy setup and using
    under ordinary system user accounts

  - Bugfixes

  NOTES (0.6.5)

    - There are changes in the configuration file. It is highly
      recommended to replace your speechd.conf file with the
      speechd.conf provided in this package and copy your settings
      there. The old configuration file should however also work.

    - Default output module has been switched to espeak.

    - By default, the communication port of Speech Dispatcher
      is only opened for localhost connections. Please see
      the LocalhostAccessOnly option in speechd.conf for
      information on how to allow connections from other
      manchines as well.

* Where to get it?

   You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from

http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.5.tar.gz

   We recommend you to fetch the sound icons for use with Speech Dispatcher.
   They are available at
   http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

   Corresponding Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu packages will soon be
available at
   your distribution mirrors.

   The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* How to report bugs?

   Please report bugs at <speechd at bugs.freebsoft.org>. For other
   contact please use <speechd at lists.freebsoft.org>


Happy synthesizing!

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