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Mina Michael
Asked: 2015-02-24 14:11:15 +0800 CST

What is "speech dispatcher"?

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I'm having trouble getting sound out of Ubuntu. Some article advised to enable the "speech dispatcher" from /etc/default/speech-dispatcher. What is it? What does it do? Any ideas?

sound

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's a daemon that programs can use to output speech, without caring about the actual speech synthesis software required for the language.

    Project homepage is http://devel.freebsoft.org/speechd

    You can use it with spd-say:

    $ spd-say Hello!
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  2. From the speech-dispatcher man pages:

    DESCRIPTION
       speech-dispatcher  is  a  server process that is responsible for trans‐
       forming requests for text-to-speech output into actual speech  hearable
       in the speakers. It arbitrates concurrent speech requests based on mes‐
       sage priorities, and abstracts different  speech  synthesizers.  Client
       programs,  like  screen  readers  or  navigation  software, send speech
       requests to speech-dispatcher using TCP  protocol  (with  the  help  of
       client  libraries).  speech-dispatcher is usually started automatically
       by client libraries (i.e. autospawn), so you only need to run it  manu‐
       ally if testing/debugging, or when in other explicit need for a special
       setup.

    Unless you already modified your system settings, the spd should already be started automatically.

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