[Kde-accessibility] Another speech engine for KTTS?

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <4df5b93ce6jsd at clara.co.uk>,
   Jonathan Duddington <jsd at clara.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <200602071959.54036.garycramblitt at comcast.net>,
>    Gary Cramblitt <garycramblitt at comcast.net> wrote:

> portaudio is a "cross platform open-source audio I/O library".
> Details are at: www.portaudio.com

> The Debian package  libportaudio0  was included on the Mepis Linux
> distribution that I use.  It should be readily available.

> > Based on the README and "speak --help" it does not appear that
> > linux_speak will create a wav file.

If you were able to do  speak --help  then libportaudio must have been
present, otherwise the speak program would fail to run at all.  I used
the PortAudio library because I noticed that the Audacity sound editor
used it.  It allows the program to process the next sentence while
speaking the previous one.

> Thanks for the information. Producing a WAV output file with a -w
> argument should be simple enough.

I've updated it now. 
http://home.clara.net/jsd/linux/linux_speak.zip

Version 1.03 now includes a -w argument to produce the speech output as
a WAV file.  This works OK with KTTS, except there seems to be a small
amount of noise (hiss) added which was not there in the WAV file.  Is
KTTS resampling the sound or processing it in some way?  I produced the
WAV with a 22050 Hz sample rate.

I made sure the KTTSMgr "Speed" setting was set to 100%.  This seems to
be a global setting, applied to all talkers.  Is there a way to prevent
the SOX "Speed" being applied to talkers which can manage their own
speed, since that gives better quality, which you wouldn't want
disturbed when you adjust the speed of one of the other talkers.