Proposition for SDL_TTS (Text To Speech)

I’m about to writing a little SDL extension
for SDL Text To Speech support.
Is anyone interested at this project?

Now I’ve written the WIN32 section using
the SAPI windows interface.
In linux I’d like to use the festival libraries
(cause they’re free) but for now I really don’t
know how to use them.
Is there anyone already skilled with them that
can help me in coding?

Thanks much!

Bye,
Enzo.

yes i am, sir !

since my amiga, i love the way my computer speaks (something like HAL)

is there a link to get the win32 section ?

see you,
Antoine

Enzo wrote:> I’m about to writing a little SDL extension

for SDL Text To Speech support.
Is anyone interested at this project?

Now I’ve written the WIN32 section using
the SAPI windows interface.
In linux I’d like to use the festival libraries
(cause they’re free) but for now I really don’t
know how to use them.
Is there anyone already skilled with them that
can help me in coding?

Thanks much!

Bye,
Enzo.

is there a link to get the win32 section ?

No, not yet, before doing it I want to do just some little test.
But don’t worry… I’ll put it on the web very soon!

Enzo.

I’m about to writing a little SDL extension
for SDL Text To Speech support.
Is anyone interested at this project?

Interesting - and I can think of many applications which may benefit
from such a useful feature, although I do not have the time to write any
of them at this time.

Now I’ve written the WIN32 section using
the SAPI windows interface.

… such as it is. :wink:

In linux I’d like to use the festival libraries
(cause they’re free) but for now I really don’t
know how to use them.

Please consider also the use of /dev/mumble. While that is primarily
targetted toward hardware synthesizers such as the DECtalk, it is the
only existing standard for speech synthesis in Linux. Using it is just
a matter of using the proper ioctls. I do not know the /dev/mumble
ioctls, but as a responsible blind Linux user, I should direct you to
http://leb.net/blinux/, where you can find information (mostly biased in
favor of emacspeak) about accessable software. Most of the people you
will encounter are fairly nice and helpful and I am sure they would be
happy to help you with text to speech interfaces of any kind.

Most of us consider festival just a mere toy. IBM’s ViaVoice is better
at least, but I still find it far inferior to a Keynote Gold or a
DECtalk. (If you have ever heard TTS in a professional application,
such as the device used by Stephen Hawking, it’s a DECTalk…)

Is there anyone already skilled with them that
can help me in coding?

They can help I’m sure. =)On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 01:57:05PM +0200, Enzo wrote:


Joseph Carter Free software developer

I am amazed that no-one’s based a commercial distribution on Debian yet -
it is by far the most solid UNIX-like OS I’ve ever installed, and I’ve
played with HP/UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, BSDi, and SCO (not to mention OS/2,
Novell, Win95/NT)
– Nathan Norman

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed…
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/attachments/20011003/b070cb36/attachment.pgp

I don’t know how I missed the original post from Enzo, but I’m
definitely interested! While working on TuxMath (an educational game)
I realized it would be very useful to have speech capabilities,
but decided there’s no portable way to do speech synthesis
(between, say, Mac, Linux, BeOS, Windows).

Of course, with a game like TuxMath, you don’t need too many words
(just numbers, math operations (“plus”, “minus”, etc.) and some status
(“score is ABC”, “beginning level XYZ”, etc.)

I’m sure there’ll be edutainment games I’ll work on down the road where
more generic speech would be important, so I’m glad to see someone working
on a solution. (Even if, at first, it’s just a series of “#ifdef”'s
and calls to existing libraries, based on target OS :slight_smile: )

-bill!On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 10:07:27AM -0700, Joseph Carter wrote:

On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 01:57:05PM +0200, Enzo wrote:

I’m about to writing a little SDL extension
for SDL Text To Speech support.
Is anyone interested at this project?

I’ve been using Festival in a little SDL project of my own:
http://www.geekcomix.com/dm/tuxread/

and I think I could help you out a bit with respect to it.

One thing I really should say about Festival (since this subject comes up so
often on this list)… Festival is really not something you could use in
apps that need quick & reliable response (I.e. most games). Festival is very
slow, and not always reliable (it’s slow because it actually does more than
most other speech synthesizers out there do, and is much more expandable [can
support different languages, which is very nice]).

Also, compiling apps using Festival’s C/C++ interface is a nightmare… not
even worth it. The way I use Festival is via it’s network interface, which
means you would need to have SDL_net as a requirement under most Unix
platforms. The network interface is really the easiest way to use it, but,
then you lose reliability (you don’t know when, or even if, the speech took
place).

In other words, if you don’t mind the problems Festival can cause for your
extension library, I’d be happy to lend you some help in making it work (and
actually, anyone else interested in using Festival in their app could ask me
as well. Festival actually compiles on most Unixes, and on Win32, FYI ;-)On Wednesday 03 October 2001 4:57, Enzo wrote:

I’m about to writing a little SDL extension
for SDL Text To Speech support.
Is anyone interested at this project?

Now I’ve written the WIN32 section using
the SAPI windows interface.
In linux I’d like to use the festival libraries
(cause they’re free) but for now I really don’t
know how to use them.
Is there anyone already skilled with them that
can help me in coding?


Sam “Criswell” Hart <@Sam_Hart> AIM, Yahoo!:
Homepage: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/ >
PGP Info: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/contact/ >
Tux4Kids: < http://www.geekcomix.com/tux4kids/ >

Please consider also the use of /dev/mumble. While that is primarily
targetted toward hardware synthesizers such as the DECtalk, it is the
only existing standard for speech synthesis in Linux. Using it is just
a matter of using the proper ioctls. I do not know the /dev/mumble
ioctls, but as a responsible blind Linux user, I should direct you to
http://leb.net/blinux/, where you can find information (mostly biased in
favor of emacspeak) about accessable software. Most of the people you
will encounter are fairly nice and helpful and I am sure they would be
happy to help you with text to speech interfaces of any kind.

This would be a great alternative as well. I would recommend using this in
SDL_TTS over Festival.

Most of us consider festival just a mere toy.

I don’t know if I’d consider it a “toy” :wink:

It certainly does more than is necessary for most applications, and is a
nightmare to interface with using C/C++ (meaning it’s probably not the best
option for most people on this list)… But, in its scope, it does what it
does very well.On Wednesday 03 October 2001 10:07, Joseph Carter wrote:


Sam “Criswell” Hart <@Sam_Hart> AIM, Yahoo!:
Homepage: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/ >
PGP Info: < http://www.geekcomix.com/snh/contact/ >
Tux4Kids: < http://www.geekcomix.com/tux4kids/ >

William Kendrick wrote:

While working on TuxMath (an educational game)

Nice!
I write educational games too…

Enzo.

Ok,
I made a little page for SDL_tts project
(now in pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha version) :slight_smile:

the URL is

http://digilander.iol.it/enzogupi/opensource.html

I’ve tested it only with windows 9x and IBM ViaVoice OutLoud
(but all speech synthesis under win32 use the same SAPI interface).
If compiled under linux it makes only some dummy output in console.

Enzo.