Kttsd 0.5.0

Ktts is finally getting a version bump since 4.0. What can you expect in this release (that will come out with KDE SC 4.4 as part of kde-accessibility)? Well, a lot of things have changed, but more is still a work in progress. The most significant change is that ktts now talks directly to speech-dispatcher, which is a daemon that handles all speech from kde, gnome, console, etc. Speech-dispatcher itself supports many synthesizers like espeak, festival and so on. The plan was to make ktts expose all of the capabilities of speech-dispatcher, but it didn't quite get to that point yet.

The first new thing you should note is that if speech-dispatcher is set up, ktts doesn't need any voices configured at all. speech-dispatcher uses whichever synthesizer it can find and plays a dummy wav file if it can't find any. (The talkers tab in kttsmgr doesn't really affect anything inside speech-dispatcher yet anyway...) You can play with the different voices from the jobs tab though, setting different pitch, volume and speed, hitting apply, then clicking speak clipboard contents (I'll add a test button for 4.5, or possibly 4.4.1 if the translators let me).

One thing that didn't make it in to this release was the gui for setting up speech-dispatcher. It has a command-line configuration tool called spd-conf which works fine. But I would like to get a gui for it in the next release if time permits.

I'd also like to join kttsd and kttsmgr into one process/app, kttsd doesn't do job management anymore because speech-dispatcher does all that now (yes I know the jobs tab will be renamed at some point, since it doesn't deal with jobs at all). So joining kttsmgr and kttsd makes sense I believe. Alternatively making speech-dispatcher have its own dbus access would remove the need for kttsd completely, kttsmgr could then just be a gui for configuring and controlling speech-dispatcher itself. We'll see which direction things go as this progresses.

Anyway, junt wanted to give a short update. Enjoy the wonder that KDE SC 4.4 will bring =)