Speech-dispatcher and the -generic modules for Dectalk and Swift voices

[Garry Turkington]

Hi,

Following up on my own post as I solved my problems and wanted to share in 
case it's helpful to others.

Firstly, never underestimate the power of user error.  I'd screwed up a 
symlink to the Dectalk say executable so speech-dispatcher couldn't find 
it.  The log files in /var/log/speech-dispatcher (one per module) are 
really really helpful.

I also found that reducing the number of speech-dispatcher modules added 
to the absolute minimum needed helped.  I was getting a broken pipe error 
when trying to use Cepstral but it seems to have been caused by a 
different module that I wasn't using.  Uncommenting only the espeak, 
dectalk and cepstral modules meant I could get all working.

The ALSA/OSS problem did arise so installing the aoss tool from the 
alsa-oss package was the answer.  I changed the relevant module conf file 
to use that when calling the executable and again that worked out.

I tried various sound output and for Dectalk at least I was getting minor 
clicks at the end of each utterance when using PulseAudio.  For this synth 
I found the ALSA output with the aoss as described above worked best.

Because the Swift module actually generates a wav file and then sends that 
to the sound system I find the swift module has too much lag for my 
tastes.  Which is a shame as the Cepstral voices are superb.

Hope that's useful to someone,
Garry

-- 
Garry Turkington
garry.turkington at gmail.com

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Garry Turkington wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After living with an old speakup 2.x install for an age I finally got
> around to building an up-to-date Ubuntu install.  I've
> got Orca working with gnome-speech but also want speakup for terminal
> access.
>
> Since I want to use either Dectalk or Cepstral voices I've configured
> speech-dispatcher/speechd-up and can get it to work
> fine with espeak.  But when I try to use the dtk-generic module I get no
> speech via spd-say.
>
> At first it appeared to be an Alsa/OSS thing as I think speech-dispatcher
> was locking /dev/dsp and the Dectalk libraries
> seem to want to talk to it directly via OSS.  So I switched
> speech-dispatcher to use OSS and the conflict is gone in that
> while speech-dispatcher is configured with espeak I can successfully use
> the Dectalk command line say utility.  But when I
> try and move to the dtk-generic module I get nothing.
>
> Plainly there's some incantation I'm missing here -- does anyone know it?
>
> I'll move onto Cepstral Swift after hopefully resolving this -- currently
> just loading the Swift module kills
> speech-dispatcher...
>
> Thanks,
> Garry
>
>
> -- 
> Garry Turkington
> garry.turkington at gmail.com
>
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