Speech Dispatcher's project goal is to provide a device independent layer for speech synthesis through a simple, stable and well documented interface.
It takes care of most of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is to speech synthesis.
The application simply calls Speech Dispatcher interface functions and Speech Dispatcher handles its requests by sending them to particular synthesizer, handling priorities of the messages, keeping track of their history and providing some extra features like sound icons etc. The application neither needs to talk to synthesizers directly nor to fiddle with all the hard aspects of speech synthesis.
The architecture of Speech Dispatcher is based on a proven client/server model. The clients are all the applications in the system that want to speak. The basic means of client communication with Speech Dispatcher is through a TCP connection using the Speech Synthesis Independent Protocol (SSIP), however client libraries for various languages are also written as a part of the project, so usage is very straightforward. Currently we are working on C, Python, Elisp and Common Lisp library.
Speech Dispatcher is a control application, it doesn't perform the hard task of synthesizing the sound output itself. It can use any particular speech synthesizer (such as Festival, Flite, Epos etc.), through the concept of output modules – you can write an output module for any synthesizer you like.
Additionally, Speech Dispatcher can be configured to switch contexts on one synthesizer when used by multiple clients or to use different synthesizers for different clients (or different languages).
What's New in This Release:
· This release adds support for eSpeak and IBM TTS.
· There are numerous bugfixes.
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