[Fedora-livecd-list] Report On F-11 Beta With Orca

[Janina Sajka]

Splitting my responses into two emails ..

Jeremy Katz writes:
> On Monday, April 06 2009, Janina Sajka said:
> > Problem Areas
> > 
> > *	It would be preferable to use gnome-speech-espeak as the default
> > *	Orca driver for several reasons:
> > 	-- Espeak is more responsive and that's a big deal with a screen
> > reader. Low latency, quick "shutup," etc., are far more important to
> > screen reading than high quality speech synthesis.
> > 
> > 	-- Festival is a particularly bad choice in the "shutup"
> > department. It will keep speaking until it has finished the string it
> > was given to say, whatever the user does. This makes for very sluggish
> > handling. The user must wait for the computer to finish speaking, with
> > no ability to stop speech and move on. This has things the wrong way
> > round as computers should wait on people, not people on computers.
> 
> How do they compare size-wise?  In any case, file an RFE against the
> gnome-speech package as it looks like that's where the change would need
> to be.
>  
I'm so glad you asked! <big grin>

Looking just at the rpm sizes, espeak is about 1.3M and
gnome-speech-espeak is about 16K.

This compares to about 13.8M for the three Festival packages--so a
significantly smaller footprint. Is Festival present only for Orca? Or
for other applications in the Live image as well?

Also, are you suggesting filing the RFE with the upstream GNOME project?
Or for the Fedora Live product itself?

There are several TTS options supported in gnome-speech-[package.name]
in order to give users the widest possible selection. Espeak is the only
GPL (V3), so more F/OSS license than Festival.

I should hasten to clarify that I have nothing against Festival. It just
doesn't do as well on some key user requirements for screen reader TTS
engines. But, then it was never designed for screen reader use.

Janina