Re: Protocol for speaking daemon (comments expected)

[Bryan Smart <bsmart@pobox.com>]

>To synchronize speech, a 'wait' command can be used which returns a message
>when the specified message 'id' has been 'spoken'.  Hence, a synchronized

Also, the wait command should have some kind of time out parameter which
can notify the client if the server is unable to catch up to its message in
the queue before the specified time passes.  Of course the query command
that you mentioned could check this, but it might be nice to let the say
command return a message specifying that the command has timed out.

Say commands should also have some kind of priority indicator.  For
example, status messages should be given a higher priority than just
regular text.  E.G. While reading a document, status messages should be
spoken as soon as they are available (perhaps using a different
'personality' -- see below).

>set commands can be introduced to specify global parameters for a session,
>such as: set language = English.

I think that the pitch, volume, and other similar settings should be
controlled at this point.  Also, as all synts have differing ranges of
values for each parameterh, percentages might be useful.

>Another obvious command would be query <msgid> to query the current status
>of a message.

Similar to the query command (or perhaps part of it), you should be able to
not only learn the status of a message, but determine the currently
speaking message, and, if possible, obtain more definitive information with
regards to your exact position in the message.  This would make things
similar to indexing on the Dec-Talk possible.

>The "say" command can have options, such as to specify mode (literal, spell,
>or speak), pitch and speed (assuming the tts supports it), etc.

These should be realative to the current settings (allowing a slightly
lower or higher pitch than the default, using a slightly louder or softer
volume, and so forth).

I'm not sure of the best way to do this, but there should be some way that
the 'say' command can specify different personalities when speaking text.
These, of course, would probably be different voices on the Dec-Talk, but
you should be able to provide pitch, sppeed, volume, voice, and voice
control (several synths support different voices) which have values
realative to those defined by the set commands.

Finally, it may be useful to put all of the synthesizer definitions in a
'synthcap' or similar file.  This would provide something analogus to the
SSIL standard system under Windows.

Bryan



--
Bryan R. Smart
Email: bsmart@pobox.com


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