Speech Dispatcher 0.8.8
=====================

Announcing the availability of Speech Dispatcher 0.8.8 developed as a part of
the Free(b)Soft project.

* What is new in 0.8.8?

 - Add German translation, thanks to Chris Leick for the patch

 - Fix some spelling mistakes, thanks to Paul Gevers for the patch

 - Some slight code improvements.

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.8.8.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!
