Speaking Applications

Speakup

EmacSpeak

The EmacSpeak by T. V. Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu> software package provides speech output for Emacs, and includes "speech servers" for the DECtalk speech synthesizers.

The package emacspeak-ss provides servers for several additional synthesizers:

None of these programs are normally run by the user directly. Instead, they are run by Emacs. That is: Emacs runs the emacspeak code, which executes Tcl, which interprets the server code. This approach is too closely "wired" to usage with Emacspeak, so it may not be used for our general purposes.

This does not mean, that these servers are compleetly a bad idea and we can not use them. Thanks to the author Jim Van Zandt), we can learn from the sources and write the output driver modules for Speech Daemon (emacspeek-ss is GPL).

Bart Bunting is working on a speech server using the MBrola speech synthesis.

Graphical X11 applications

The problem of speaking X Window applications can be devided into several subproblems.

Widget toolkit libraries

Several windowing toolkit libraries take speech support into a focus the last few years. These are:

  • GTK+ (Gnome Accessibility project)

  • wxWindows

  • Java AWT

  • FOX toolkit

We hope to be able to integrate Speech Daemon into these projects in the future.