Re: [OT] Anything simpler than emacspeak?
on Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 12:15:15PM -0500, Patrick Wiseman (pwiseman@mindspring.com) wrote:
> Hello, all:
>
> I'm trying to set up a Debian laptop (so this is not _completely_
> offtopic :) for my Dad, whose sight has almost failed. I have bought
> Fonix's DECtalk software, and it works quite nicely on the command
> line (i.e. it "speaks" what I type), but the only application I can
> find which uses it is emacspeak, which has way too steep a learning
> curve and in any event is much more than Dad needs, which is basically
> web-browsing (lynx would be good) and email (for which I'd set him up
> with mutt or pine). I tried screader, but couldn't get it to work
> with DECtalk's 'say' program; and its documentation is so sketchy, I
> couldn't begin to diagnose the problem.
>
> Any help will be much appreciated, and I'll report back (and probably
> create a website) so that anyone else wanting to set up a minimal but
> functional "talking" system will be able to do it more easily!
There's 'festival', a text-to-speech program (English and American
accents available ;-). It can be configured to take input as stdin and
read out the text. I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for.
I've played with it a little bit -- mostly setting it up to read fortune
output at random intervals (to annoy cow-orkers, of course ;-), or to
announce system issues (e.g.: "can't reach $HOST"), though I've also
piped lynx output through it.
It works. Sort of. Not sure what exactly your goals are though.
BTW, my understanding of emacspeak was that it required a voice card --
hardware to actually generate the output. The nice thing about festival
is that it works with a standard audio card.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
KQED FM: The bright spot on the dial: http://www.kqed.org/fm/
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