[Xastir] new feature request: speech for Mac os X 10.3

Jason Winningham jdw at eng.uah.edu
Mon Apr 26 14:18:46 EDT 2004


Not sure where to direct this, but Mac os X 10.3 (Panther) has a 
command line interface to the speech synthesis built in to os X.  To 
get something spoken, just execute the "say" command with a string or 
input file and Panther takes it from there.  It would be nice to have 
xastir talk to me on the laptop while driving.

After glancing at festival.c in xastir1.3.1/src I think it would be 
fairly easy to either replace the socket to festival with a simple 
fork/exec of the say command, then change festivalStringToSpeech() to 
write to that fd or, maybe even easier, do everything in 
festivalStringToSpeech() with a separate fork/exec for every call to 
festivalStringToSpeech().

There is an API interface to Apple speech synthesis, but I have no idea 
if it would be appropriate or how difficult it is to use.  I think the 
CLI would suffice.

I'd be happy to assist with testing and I may be convinced to write 
some code, but I'm not really sure how the calls to functions in 
fetstival.c get made, and I don't know how to integrate with 
"configure" and friends.

-Jason
----------------------------------------
Jason Winningham
Computer Systems Engineer
College of Engineering
The University of Alabama in Huntsville
http://support.eng.uah.edu/	http://www.eng.uah.edu/~jdw




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