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<chapter id="ch-intro">
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<title>Introduction</title>
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<title>Speech Synthesizers</title>
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<title>Hardware devices</title>
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<para>Hardware synthesizers are the devices, which may be connected mostly to
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a serial port. Application may send textual data to the port and the device
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converts it to spoken letters and words. Data may contain also several
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control sequences in the form of escaped characters as commands.
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MBROLA is a software speech synhesis ...
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<title>Mluvitko</title>
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Mluvitko is a simple (and very light) czech software speech synhesis ...
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<title>Speaking Applications</title>
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<title>EmacSpeak</title>
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<para>The Emacspeak by T. V. Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu> software package
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provides speech output for Emacs, and includes "speech servers" for
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the DECtalk speech synthesizers.</para>
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<para>The package emacspeak-ss provides servers for several additional synthesizers:</para>
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<itemizedlist mark="opencircle">
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<listitem><para>DoubleTalk PC and AT from <ulink url="http://www.rcsys.com/">R. C. Systems</ulink></para></listitem>
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<listitem><para>Braille 'n Speak, Type 'n Speak, and Braille Lite from <ulink url="http://www.blazie.com">Blazie Engineering</ulink></para></listitem>
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<listitem><para>Accent SA</para></listitem>
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<listitem><para>Apollo 2, JUNO, and JUNO-sp from Dolphin.</para></listitem>
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<listitem><para>Spanish ciber 232</para></listitem>
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<listitem><para>Spanish ciber 232 Plus</para></listitem>
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<listitem><para>Spanish PC Hablado notebook</para></listitem>
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<para>None of these programs are normally run by the user directly. Instead,
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they are run by Emacs. That is: Emacs runs the emacspeak code, which executes
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Tcl, which interprets the server code. This approach is too closely "wired"
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to usage with Emacspeak, so it may not be used for our general purposes.</para>
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<para>This does not mean, that these servers are compleetly a bad idea and we
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can not use them. Thanks to the author <ulink
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url="mailto:jrv@vanzandt.mv.com">Jim Van Zandt</ulink>), we can learn from
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the sources and write the output driver modules for speechd (emacspeek-ss is
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<para>Bart Bunting is working on a speech server using the MBROLA software
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speech synthesizer.</para>
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<title>X Window System</title>
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There is currently (as far as we know...) no speach support for speaking X Window programs.