How to configure Qtspeech - definitely moving forward!

[Gustav Degreef]

Hi Simion,

Sorry about the spelling error, happens often with my vision problems.

You are absolutely right!  The Pause does work!!!  I just have to wait
till it gets to the end of the sentence or sometimes paragraph.  But
that is fine.  And now with the Keyboard Shortcuts, Jovie is great!  I
read a lot of articles in Medicine and I am often interrupted.  If I can
not pause and resume it is often a struggle to find where I was
listening.  This is great!!!

>From what you and others are saying and from what I've read, I think I
understand better.  Correct me if I am wrong, but don't you have to tell
speech-dispatcher which voice (e-speak, festival, etc.) to use?  If I
can figure out how to tell speech-dispatcher which voice to use then
Jovie (or Qtspeech) will then output my choice?  I have looked into it,
and there are several (about 6 different) voices I can use in Linux.

Thanks for the suggestion about Wine.  I am familiar with it and have
tried it many times.  If I could find a Windows program to do what Jovie
does, I certainly would try to use it with Wine.  I tried a lot of
programs in Windows to just simply read out selected text and I never
found a simple and easy one. I gave up.  Now with the Keyboard Shortcuts
defined, Jovie is great.  I am sorry it is being deprecated.  But that
is what happens in Linux and I am very used to it, it's the price for
constant improvement in the system as a whole.

Thanks a lot for your help, Gustav

On 9/22/19 2:59 AM, Simion wrote:
> Hi Gustav
> about the Pause button, I think is not instant, it need to finish the
> phrase, can you try to Pause  and wait half a minute and see if I am
> right about this.
> My fixes are not related to this, mostly I found bugs when sending
> text to Jovie from scripts and sending weird values , Other bug was
> about changing talkers (I use an english and a romanian talker)
>
> About better voices, Jovie uses speech dispatcher and this one uses
> festival or espeak depending on how is configured, so you need to
> google those programs.
> I do not know if those natural sounding voices are compatible with
> this Linux programs,  other alternative is to try Windows programs in
> Wine, I did this a many years back and it worked.
>
> Btw you did not read my name correctly, is  Simion , don't worry
> about it though, it happens all the time
>
> On 9/22/19 2:22 AM, Gustav Degreef wrote:
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>> Thanks a lot. I found how to configure the shortcuts.  I configured 4 -
>> Read clipboard, Stop, Pause, Resume.  All work fine except Pause.  It
>> works only 20% of the time.  I often have to repeat the shortcut over
>> and over to get it to pause, and often it does not pause.  When it
>> does,
>> Resume always works.  This is the same behavior I have always had with
>> the tray icon and why I had given up trying to use it.  If your fixes
>> fix this then I would certainly be very pleased.  I don't need any
>> other
>> functionality other than the voices.  People are always around and
>> using
>> the headphone  adds another cable to my already cluttered desk.  I
>> would
>> still very much like to be able to at least TRY different voices.  But
>> the documentation for doing this with Jovie, has been very hard to come
>> by and I have not been able to find any that really describes how to do
>> it.  Only a bit here and there of partial information that I can not
>> put
>> together.  Thanks for yours and others efforts, Gustav
>>
>> On 9/18/19 4:31 AM, Simion wrote:
>>> Hi Gustav,
>>> You can use keyboard shortcuts to control Jovie, you need to create
>>> this shortcuts, you can do it in system Settings, keyboard shortucts,
>>> Global section I think. I have a keyboard with an extra row of Media
>>> keys so I use those buttons . I use a voice with max speed (I had to
>>> train by incrementally increasing it) so it is weird for others to
>>> understand, the solution is to use headphones when others are around.
>>> I tried finding more natural sounding voices but I discovered that I
>>> prefer  faster speed so I can read things faster and the voice is
>>> not
>>> important at all.
>>>
>>> My commit messages  in Github explain what bugs fix, if you are not
>>> affected by those you can use the version from your repos.
>>>
>>> The only issue I have now is in this scenario:
>>> I open say 3 articles  in browser, use reader mode if needed, copy
>>> paste them in clipboard one by one and have jovie read the clipboard
>>>
>>> so now I have the 1,2,3 articles in a list to be read and Jovie is
>>> reading the1st one,
>>> if I use Pause and then Resume while reading article 1 , it reads
>>> Article 2, 3 and finaly it continues to finish Article 1 . It did not
>>> bother me that much to fix the bug though.
>>>
>>> When Jovie will not work I am considering  write a replacement,
>>> maybe
>>> in Python or JS so anyone can read the code, edit and try fixing or
>>> extending it the current solution where you would use QtSpeech that
>>> wraps speechdispatcher that wraps festival or espeak is cery
>>> convolutede, QtSpeech was bugged when I tested it and I am not that
>>> good at programming to build Qt from source and try to fix it I also
>>> prefer to use LTS distributions
>>>
>>>
>>> On 9/18/19 2:20 AM, Gustav Degreef wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> Yes, I am also still using Jovie.  I use it only from the tray
>>>> icon.  I
>>>> select the text, copy from context menu and then click on the tray
>>>> icon
>>>> and select to speak clipboard contents. The only other functionality I
>>>> can use is to stop the speaking at some point.  I have tried to
>>>> pause
>>>> and resume from the tray icon (which is the main functionality that I
>>>> would like) but it never works properly.  I have tried to configure
>>>> jovie to use a different voice than e-speak but i have read and
>>>> read and
>>>> never succeeded.  E-speak is fine for me, but it drives my wife
>>>> crazy,
>>>> and my friends hat the voice, no matte how i change the various
>>>> settings.  I can continue to use Jovie (without Qtspeech) as
>>>> long as it
>>>> keeps working.  But since it is deprecated, I am trying to be
>>>> prepared
>>>> when it no longer works.  That is the only reason I am trying to
>>>> move
>>>> from Jovie.  Thanks a lot for your input.  I would like to
>>>> try your
>>>> modifications., Gustav.
>>>>
>>>> On 9/17/19 9:58 AM, Simion wrote:
>>>>> Hi, I am still using Jovie, it is still present in Kubuntu 18.04
>>>>> repositories.
>>>>> When Jovie will be removed from the repos I think I may try to write
>>>>> some scripts and some GUi if needed to replace it.
>>>>>
>>>>> In my humble opinion we Linux users we need some cross desktop basic
>>>>> application, I am not sure about the desktop integration part but
>>>>> from
>>>>> what I seen when testing QtSpeech it  makes more sense for
>>>>> me to
>>>>> avoid the extra Qt abstraction or make multiple backends.
>>>>>
>>>>> out of curiosity what Jovie features you use?
>>>>> I use the following
>>>>> - the dbus /command line interface to call Jovie from scripts
>>>>> - the Global shortcuts
>>>>> - the context menu in the tray icon to change languages(that I
>>>>> contributed)
>