[BRLTTY] brltty with mbrola speech

[Olivier BERT]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 10:58:42AM -0400, Dave Mielke wrote:
> [quoted lines by Hermann on 2006/06/19 at 10:13 +0200]
> 
> >I remember that speech dispatcher was mentioned briefly in this list. 
> 
> Which is what reminded me that we needed a driver for it. :-)
> 
> >But I have no precise idea what it really does. Can anyone explain it to me?
> >Is this a synthesizer or, as I guess, a universa driver for speech
> >applications.
> 
> It's not a synthesizer. It's a server which provides a general speech interface
> to its clients and which can control whichever synthesizers it has drivers for. 
> Several clients can use it at the same time, and it has mechanisms for deciding
> which one gets priority at any given moment, etc.
> 
> >If it's a universal driver, what kind of synths does it support, 
> 
> Beiong a braille user, I haven't ever looked into this particular question very
> closely. It at least supports: Festival, Festival Lite, Dec Talk, Apollo, epos,
> and llia_phon.

As mbrola is not a complete TTS engine, it is not possible to implement 
a driver for speech-dispatcher or brltty that directly outputs to 
mbrola. 
For each language, it's neessary to have a text-to-phoneme peace of 
software. For french and english a very good one is called cicero as I 
mentionned in a earlier message (http://www.cam.org/~nico/cicero). It's 
developped by nicolas Pitre. 
On the mbrola homepage, there are several text-to-phoneme (they say 
text-to-speech on the web site) for several language. 

So you can go to the official mbrola homepage : 
tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html. 
Then, in the section text-to-speech, pick a german text-to-speech. 

The final thing will be to write a driver for speech-dispatcher that 
handles this text-to-speech software. In general, it's not very 
difficult if you know C programming to write such a driver. 
I wrote one for the cicero TTS that allow us to have a very good french 
speech feedback on linux : brltty for console, and gnopernicus or orca 
for gnome desktop. 

Regards
-- 
Olivier BERT
e-mail: obert01 at mistigri.org
Etudiant a l'E.P.I.T.A. (cycle ingenieur, 3eme annee)
Tel: 06 07 69 79 71