2 May 2010 04:59
http://www.opentts.org)
Luke Yelavich <themuso <at> themuso.com>
2010-05-02 02:59:14 GMT
2010-05-02 02:59:14 GMT
Greetings all, I am writing to propose a new external dependency for GNOME. This external dependency will replace the deprecated gnome-speech module as a desktop agnostic text to speech framework. OpenTTS is a fork of the speech-dispatcher project, which is an open source text to speech framework. You can see the original speech-dispatcher website at http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd. The reasons why a fork of speech-dispatcher was made can be found on the OpenTTS website, http://www.opentts.org/Frequently-Asked-Questions. While the OpenTTS project does not currently have any commercial backing, the current community contributors and project maintainers are an enthusiastic bunch of individuals who wish to see a standard text-to-speech API and framework for the *nix ecosystem. Use by assistive technologies is our main drive for a standard, but we also feel that text-to-speech has many other uses for many different people, not only those with a disability. We are in talks with Brailcom, the original non-proffit organisation behind the freebsoft and speech-dispatcher projects, about returning our development focus back to speech-dispatcher. However with questions still up in the air about a development model that will allow rapid development and regular releases, the OpenTTS project maintainers do not feel that concensus will be reached any time soon. Brailcom cannot promise that they will be able to commit much in the way of developer resources to speech-dispatcher, and still wish for community contributors to make patches available, and Brailcom developers occasionally reviewing these patches, committing them, and occasionally making releases of the project. This will hoefully change in the future, however for now, the OpenTTS project maint ainers feel that a fork is still the best way forward. We will always be hopeful that OpenTTS development can be merged back into speech-dispatcher proper. OpenTTS is yet to see an official tarball release, however you can check out the code in its current form from git://git.opentts.org/opentts.git. It is currently undergoing heavy development and cleanup, and may not work properly, however you can test speech-dispatcher to get an idea of what OpenTTS is and how it works. OpenTTS will likely follow a similar development model to GNOME, in that we will have a stable release series, and develope new functionality in parallel until the new code is considered mature, thereby becoming the new stable release. We intend to make our first release within the month, once the(Continue reading)
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