Re: [PATCH 0/2] Add eSpeak

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 12:26:37AM -0500, Leo Famulari wrote:
> These patches provide the eSpeak software speech synthesizer [0].

I realized that the espeak upstream has gone inactive [0] and the users have
forked the project as espeak-ng: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/

The impression I get from the espeak ML is that the fork is merging a
lot of third-party patches that improve support for different languages,
as well as cleaning up the C codebase. So, in the future we should probably
package espeak-ng as well, for the sake of users that need speech
synthesis. It will conflict with espeak since the output binaries have
the same names.

There is also the espeakedit program that allows phoneme-editing. That
should be packaged, too.

[0] Read the last few months of their ML:
http://sourceforge.net/p/espeak/mailman/espeak-general/

> 
> I need advice on what audio system to configure it to use.
> 
> This patch configures it to use PulseAudio if it is available, and to
> use PortAudio otherwise. Of course, since I have included PulseAudio as
> an input, PulseAudio is always available and it starts a PulseAudio
> server if one is not running [1].
> 
> The other option is to use only PortAudio (tested and works for me).
> 
> I guess the factors are:
> 1) Does GuixSD have a default audio setup that we should target? If
> GuixSD uses PulseAudio, then I think it would be good for eSpeak to be
> integrated into that sytem.
> 2) Does this package, which launches PulseAudio, work for anyone on a
> foreign distro?
> 
> Can GuixSD users with audio please test it out? As well as users on
> foreign distros? You can do so like this:
> `espeak 'hello world'`
> 
> [0]
> http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
> 
> [1] This is actually not the expected behaviour and I am going to file a
> bug. The Makefile reads "'runtime' uses pulseaudio if it is running,
> else uses portaudio". Instead, it starts PulseAudio on demand.
> 
> Leo Famulari (2):
>   gnu: Add sonic.
>   gnu: Add espeak.
> 
>  gnu/packages/audio.scm | 86 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 86 insertions(+)
> 
> -- 
> 2.6.4
> 
>