Speech Dispatcher 0.8.3 is out

Speech Dispatcher 0.8.3 is out now. I'll shamelessly post the release announcement e-mail below, but with this you can build and use QtSpeech for linux from the dev branch of qtspeech. It contains all the api QtSpeech requires for it's speech capabilities (QtSpeech is an optional dependency of knotifyconfig, knotifications, kanagram, khangman, and okular (frameworks version) as well as the replacement for Jovie.

Speech Dispatcher 0.8.3
=====================

Announcing the availability of Speech Dispatcher 0.8.3 developed as a part of
the Free(b)Soft project.

* What is new in 0.8.3?

 - Add API methods to get language, rate, pitch, and volume.

 -  A lot of code cleanup, and compatibility improvements.

 - Removed all references to GNOME Speech, since it has long since been
   deprecated.

 - Fix some inconsistancy in the SSIP API for voice type.

 - The SET VOICE SSIP command is now deprecated, and will be removed in 0.9.

 - The C library API now provides macro definitions for major, minor, and micro
   versions in libspeechd_versions.h.

 - The libsndfile library is now a mandetory dependency to improve the user
   experience around sound icons.

 - Fix a possible crash in the festival driver.

 - Add a configuration option to the espeak driver to show voice variants in
   the voice list. This will remain until a proper variants retrieval API is
   added for compatible synthesizers.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.8.3.tar.gz

  We recommend the use of sound icons with Speech Dispatcher.
  They are available at
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  Corresponding distribution packages should soon be available at
  your distribution mirrors.

  The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
  synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
  synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
  of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
  is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
  to speech synthesis.

  Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

  - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
    connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
    and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

  - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers so
    that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
    synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos, Espeak
    and (non-free) Dectalk software, IBM TTS, Pico and others are
    supported. Festival is an advanced Free Software synthesizer
    supporting various languages. Espeak is a very fast multi-lingual
    Free Software synthesizer.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library. Python, Common Lisp and Guile interfaces. An Elisp
    and Java libraries are developed as sperate projects speechd-el
    and speechd-java. Possibly an interface to any other language can
    be developed.

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at https://its.freebsoft.org/its/issues/project/1876 .
  For other contact please use either the above link or our mailing list
  <speechd@lists.freebsoft.org> .


Happy synthesizing!

KMouth is alive and well

I meant to have a post about Gardening efforts next, but KMouth is improving lately, so I'll throw out a quick post about progress.

KMouth master branch is now Qt3 free. It's still using K3Process for the speech synthesizer command-line calls, but all Qt3Support is gone.

In other news I started a quick Qt5/kf5/QtSpeech port of it on the frameworks branch. It runs, it speaks (with a bug fix in gerrit for QtSpeech).

It looks like this currently:

There's definitely room for improvement, but it's a good start I think. Note this wont be hitting master until after QtSpeech gets a release and KDE Applications depend on it (probably Qt 5.6).

Dusting KMouth

Besides gardening lately (more on that next time) lately I've been looking into what needs and used to use KSpeech/KTTS/Jovie. As QtSpeech will replace the functionality Jovie provided I thought I'd look at what needs doing to get stuff using QtSpeech.

Okular's frameworks branch (or maybe it's been merged to master by now, not sure) is optionally using QtSpeech.

KNotifyConfig and KNotification are optionally using QtSpeech as of the last frameworks release already.

KHangMan and KAnagram have been using QtSpeech optionally since December of last year or so.

This leaves the big one, KMouth. Unfortunately KMouth has been bitrotting since about 2006 or so. All commits since have been minor or bug fixes. Many because KFoo classes changed and were used in KMouth. It's master branch still uses Qt3Support and K3ListItem, etc.

I started a couple of months ago to start porting it away from Qt3Support and K3* so it can be ported to Qt5 and QtSpeech, but it's been a long slow process. Current progress can be seen on the noqt3support branch, but even the last commit there is from a couple of months ago. Part of the trouble has been getting the PhraseBookDialog with it's accompanying model and treeview to work as it used to including drag and drop, copy/paste, import, export, save/load, etc.. Many bug fixes are also in the works, and I am positive it will be better than before once it's done, but it's taking time since I don't want to break loading phrasebook files of any existing users (If there are any out there, please shout, I'd love to hear from you about how you use KMouth).

Once KMouth is ported to QtSpeech I believe most/all users of the old KSpeech dbus api will be safely using the new QtSpeech library.

P.S. Once it's ported to Qt5/KF5 and QtSpeech KMouth could use some updating. A couple of years ago I saw a fancy speech application on the evening news that enabled a young man to speak with his family by tapping icons on an ipad which then spoke for him. KMouth could be useful in the same way with a bit of polish in my opinion.

Next KDE Gardening project api.kde.org docs.kde.org and englishbreakfastnetwork.org

The KDE gardening team has chosen as it's next target for gardening the documentation/api websites. https://community.kde.org/Gardening/docwebsites The initial objectives are there on the wiki, but feel free to modify/update them if I got anything wrong or something is already in the works. The general idea is to improve these sites by getting kf5 based applications and libraries (which aren't frameworks themselves) apidocs, documentation, and code checks on these sites as they were in Qt4/KDELibs times. 

Another good objective is to make them work faster/better by not recreating everything each day, but only incrementally updating their content somehow if possible. 

And finally I'd like to get bug products/components for each of them so if issues are found we, as a community, can track the issues and fix them as a team.

The plan is to focus on these over the course of April and May and at the end of May have a gardening day on a saturday to wrap it up like we did on the KRecipes gardening day.

P.S. we'll be using #kde-devel for discussion of this project and how to help contribute, come join us and let's get some stuff working better in this area.

KRecipes 2.1

The KDE Gardening team has at last finished the Love project KRecipes with the 2.1 release which can be found here: http://download.kde.org/stable/krecipes/2.1.0/src/krecipes-2.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist

Enjoy.

node.js experience wanted

Hello all,

If there's anyone in the community, or even just reading this blog, that has experience with node.js and a bit of time I would like to recruit you for a special task. The task is to get bodega-server (and maybe the webapp or admin client too if you're so inclined) to actually work again. It worked at some point in the past year from what I hear, but currently it just spews 404 error pages for any api call it gets. I gather that this is because the nodes that it uses have changed their api since it was written. My time is limited and I've poked it enough to not give warnings at runtime anymore, but someone that really knows the ins and outs of node.js could probably fix it much faster than I so I am asking for such a brave soul to come forward and get the next generation software/data/"stuff" distribution system to do so. I know you're out there and you're considering, stop considering, hop on #kde-devel or #kde-www or anywhere on freenode and find me or others trying to get this going. Or just look at the code itself here and throw me some pointers.

I can't promise much except fame, thanks, admiration of your peers, etc. but hopefully that's enough.

P.S. this couldn't happen soon enough, ocs/attica, knewstuff, and opendesktop/kde-look, etc. are really showing their age. Having bodega working would make a lot of awesome things possible again.

QtSpeech progress

This week some changes in knotifications/knotifyconfig/kanagram/okular are in the works. The kanagram changes are already on master, the others are in review. Those changes are bringing back the use of text to speech features via the new QtSpeech module. Some have asked what the status of QtSpeech is, so I thought I'd share a bit about it here.

Frederik Gladhorn created the QtTextToSpeech module a while ago as a test to see how feasible it would be to wrap all the platforms Qt is supported on's TTS APIs in one easy to use Qt API. This turned out to be a great idea in my opinion. The predecessor to QtSpeech in KDE applications was Jovie, formerly known as kttsd. While it worked for the most part it required a daemon to be running which spoke with different synthesizers (originally) then was modified to use speech-dispatcher directly instead (when it was renamed to Jovie). QtSpeech on the other hand is a library. If you want to use it, you link to it in your application, create a QTextToSpeech object, and pass any text to speak to it's "say" method. No D-Bus connection required, no daemon required, just a small, light library that wraps the native platform TTS API directly.

As for the status of QtSpeech, I'm afraid it's not quite ready for prime time. It wont likely get added to Qt 5.5 which has feature freeze next Monday. It is however ready to be tested, improved, etc. on each platform. Most of it's API is implemented completely on linux, The basic API (saying text) is implemented on Android, Windows and Mac OS X. Patches are on gerrit to implement the rest of the API (getting available voices, locales, setting the voice) on OS X and will be written soon for Windows also. I plan to spend a bit of time on it each week so it will be ready for release with Qt 5.6 and I hope anyone else interested will join us.

More information about QtSpeech can be found here http://qt-project.org/wiki/QtSpeech. I hope this update has been helpful.

P.S. Here's a work in progress screenshot of the example widget Frederik created which is inside the QtSpeech git repository as it appears on OS X.

Edit: The wiki has been moved apparently. It's now found here: https://wiki.qt.io/index.php?title=QtSpeech