[Kde-accessibility] [kde-announce] [Announce] KTTS 0.2.0 Released

[Gary Cramblitt]

The KDE Accessibility team is pleased to announce the first public release of 
KTTS -- the KDE Text-to-Speech System.

KTTS is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for conversion of text to audible 
speech. KTTS is currently under development and aims to become the standard 
subsystem for all KDE applications to provide speech output.

User Features:

 _ Speak any text from the KDE clipboard.
 
 _ Speak any plain text file.
 
 _ Speak all or any portion of a text file from Kate.
 
 _ Speak all or any portion of an HTML page from Konqueror.
 
 _ Use as the speech backend for KMouth and KSayIt.
 
 _ Speak KDE notifications (KNotify).
 
 _ Long text is parsed into sentences. User may backup by sentence or 
paragraph, replay, pause, and stop playing.
 
 _ Audio output via aRts or GStreamer (version 0.8.7 or later)

Programmer features:

 _ Priority system for screen reader outputs, warnings and messages, while 
still playing regular texts.

 _ Plugin-based architecture for support of a wide variety of speech synthesis 
engines and drivers.

 _ Permit generation of speech from the command line (or via shell scripts) 
using the KDE DCOP utilities.

 _ Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications to 
generate speech output.

 _ Applications need not be concerned about contention over the speech device.

 _ FUTURE: Provide support for speech markup languages, such as VoiceXML, 
Sable, Java Speech Markup Language (JSML), and Speech Markup Meta-language 
(SMML).

 _ FUTURE: Provide limited support for embedded speech markers.

 _ Asynchronous to prevent system blocking.

KTTS actually consists of several programs: 

kttsd: the KDE Text-to-Speech Deamon, which is a non-GUI application that 
provides TTS services to applications via DCOP. 

kttsmgr: a GUI application for configuring and controlling kttsd. kttsmgr sits 
in the system tray. 

libkhtmlkttsdplugin: A plugin for the Konqueror web browser that permits you 
to speak all or a portion of the text on a web page. 

katekttsdplugin: A plugin for the Kate text editor that permits you to speak 
all or a portion of a text file.

To use KTTS, you need KDE 3.2 or greater and a speech synthesizer, such as 
Festival, Festival Lite (flite), Epos, Hadifix, or FreeTTS.

For more information and downloads, including Debian and SuSe binary packages, 
see the KTTS website at 

  http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/

-- 
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php
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