Idea: language plugins

[Tomas Cerha]

Milan Zamazal napsal(a):
> Please note Speech Dispatcher's job is not to synthesize anything, it
> just manages and plays messages.  What you describe is a typical job of
> a speech synthesizer so things like this should be implemented (and I'm
> even tempted to say "fixed") in the speech synthesizer.

Hello, let me just add a few notes on this.  We also thought about such
a layer in the very initial Speech Dispatcher design.  But we later
realized we are getting into a lot of troubles with such a design and
had to abandon the thought.  It really is the job of the TTS layer
(think about the name).

I understand it is a tempting idea to manage those conversions centrally
and be able to do a good job even with a very dumb synthesizer, but I
also believe Speech Dispatcher is not a good place for this.  One
example of a technical problem of such a design is the support for
callbacks.  If the text is changed on its way from application to the
synthesizer, the indexes reported by the synthesizer are no longer valid
within the original text.

Best regards,

Tomas