speak_lib.h for yasr; Speech::eSpeak for Speech::Synthesis

[pj at pjb.com.au]

Greetings all,

The current yasr version is from February 2008.  I can't get
yasr to use espeak properly, which it has to do through emacspeak.
That's silly; it should directly support espeak, which has a good C
calling interface, see the file speak_lib.h which you may have already:
  /usr/include/espeak/speak_lib.h
and if not, it's included in the Perl CPAN Speech::eSpeak module:
  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Speech::eSpeak

In Perl, Jouke Visser's CPAN module
  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Speech::Synthesis
provides a generic interface for different TTS Engines.
That would be good, but it was last updated in 2005 and only supports:
  MSAgent, SAPI4 and SAPI5 (Win32), MacSpeech and Festival
so it doesn't yet know about espeak :-(
It would be fairly easy to use the Speech::eSpeak module:
  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Speech::eSpeak
to give it espeak, though...

We have too many of these half-abandoned projects :-(
These are two relatively high-value, relatively easy ones.
Mike Gorse is not maintaining yasr, but might add espeak support
if a suitable patch were submitted; Jouke Visser I can't contact
(are you here, Jouke?) and if he's actually disappeared then
it should be possible for someone to adopt his module in CPAN.
If there's no-one on this list can do it, it shouldn't take much
fundraising to hire a couple of sighted programmers for a few days...

Regards,  Peter Billam

http://www.pjb.com.au      pj at pjb.com.au     (03) 6278 9410
"Follow the charge, not the particle."  --  Richard Feynman
 from The Theory of Positrons, Physical Review, 1949