[Gambas-user] Text to Speech

Tony Sales asa at ...1615...
Thu Dec 7 20:14:52 CET 2006


I would like to thank Stefano and Timothy for their replies to my query
regarding calling text to speech from within Gambas. 

Stafano's suggestion of using the shell was quite straight-forward!

the line: 
SHELL "echo hello world| festival --tts" 
read out the string "hello world" 
and the line: 
SHELL "festival --tts textfile" 
read out the contents of the text file  "textfile"!

However I was unable to pass a string from gambas to the shell. 

I tried:
DIM StringX AS String
StringX = textbox1.text
SHELL "echo StringX| festival --tts"
but this just read out "StringX" as a string

Is there an easy way to pass variables to the shell?

Secondly, this method calls festival anew each time, is there a way of
starting festival and keeping it running in the background and sending
text to it?

I presume this would involve calling festival-server and then using
festival-client calls to send the text?

Timothy sent me two complete sample applications written in Gambas, one
of which will run on my version of Gambas (I can read the code of but
not run the other one). The sample program calls the KDE speech manager
using DCOP and reads out text. This works really well, but is obviously
designed for the KDE desktop (although it works with Gnome). This has
plenty of sample code to get me started. I will first try to modify the
existing code - probably by adding speech to the navigation of the
program itself. Ideally I want a way of calling festival directly in
Gnome without having to use the KDE speech manager as a middle-man! I
presume this would have to be done using DBUS rather than DCOP which is
designed for the KDE desktop environment.

Again I would welcome any advice and or suggestions as to how this might
be achieved. My ultimate ambition is to build a suite of talking office
applications - e-mail, word-processor, internet browser and file manager
which do not rely on a third-party screen-reader. The idea being that I
could then create a customised Ubuntu CD on which this suite would start
up automatically for my blind and partially sighted students!

Thanks for all the useful help and advice, I really appreciate people
taking the time to share their knowledge with people like myself who are
just trying to make the 'final leap of faith' into Linux!

drbongo








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