Re: Software Speech (Re: ibm tts run-time engine purchasing alternatives)

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

ViaVoice does not have a native x86_64 version --- but the 32 bit
version on my AMD64 is very stable.

Most of the crashes you are seeing -- both the  older ViaVoice
and Software Dectalk are a result of their writing directly to
the audio device using OSS. 


Emacspeak Viavoice servers have   avoided this by getting wave
output back in memory and handling it cleanly -- and with the
ALSA support, the crashes are mostly gone --- I still see a few
restarts on my laptop when there are multiple channels of audio
happening in parallel.

>>>>> "Jason" == Jason White <jasonw@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
    Jason> Along similar lines, I've managed to set up software
    Jason> DECTALK 4.61 with 32-bit versions of tcl and all
    Jason> necessary libraries to run on my AMD64 laptop. It
    Jason> isn't very reliable, however, and crashes quite
    Jason> unpredictably. Until I upgraded the kernel to use
    Jason> udev, one symptom of the problems was that the
    Jason> permissions on /dev/audio would somehow be changed to
    Jason> exclude write access whenever a crash happened, so
    Jason> I'de have to become root and fix it before restarting
    Jason> the speech server.
    Jason> 
    Jason> After the kernel upgrade, the system now uses udev
    Jason> rather than devfs for device management and
    Jason> consequently, for some reason, the permission problem
    Jason> is gone, though unfortunately not the crashes
    Jason> themselves.
    Jason> 
    Jason> On campus I now have access to a braille display, thus
    Jason> the speech problems are more of an annoyance than a
    Jason> major obstacle: I just bring in my laptop, connect the
    Jason> braille display and get work done. I'll probably try
    Jason> ViaVoice when it becomes available, especially if they
    Jason> have a native x86_64 version.
    Jason> 
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-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
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