Bug#848016: brltty-espeak: very monotonous speech and noticable delays in speech output
Control: reassign 848016 brltty-espeak
I still can confirm these issues (Debian testing, Brltty 5.4-3 and brltty-espeak 5.4-3). They also
occur after a fresh installation of Debian testing (minimal installation). Especially the speech
delay is a serious problem and should be addressed before the final release.
I currently run Brltty from the git repository (Rev BRLTTY-5.4-135-g9b144929) with the
libespeak-dev:amd64 version 1.48.04 package. That combination still works as expected (no delay and
no monotonous output).
Every two or three days I encounter a espeak crash. That means, that Brltty still works but the
speech output is killed. A simple restart of Brltty fixes that. In summer, when this issue occurred
for the first time, that crashes came much more often (about every 5 minutes). I don't know, why
that's much better now.
So far I didn't encounter such behavior with the brltty-espeak package from the Debian repositories,
which is linked against libespeak-ng. Therefore we may choose between the reproducible espeak-ng
problems and the old espeak crashes, which became much less common for no apparent reason.
I highly appreciate the espeak-ng development and I hope, that the delay and output problems can be
fixed there in time. But at the current situation, we have to find the least problematic solution
for the upcoming Debian release. Would the espeak crashes still occur much more often, the choice of
course would be, to link against espeak-ng. But under the condition, that the espeak crashes now
occur so infrequently, I think, that linking against the old espeak library is the less painful
solution for now.
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