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

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Jason Winningham wrote:

> 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.

Did someone already tackle this?  I seem to remember something in
recent months about it.  Can't recall whether anyone did this
interface, or if it was just a proposal like yours.

Easy way to do it though:  Put in some #ifdef's that change the
SayText()" function to go through the MacOSX method if you're
running on that platform.

We call SayTextInit() once, then SayText() every time we want it to
speak.

If you code up something that works, the rest of us will integrate
it in so that it works for everything else.

--
Curt, WE7U			    archer at eskimo dot com
Arlington, WA, USA		http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"