kde-extraapps/jovie

Jovie -- KDE Text-to-Speech -- is a subsystem within the KDE desktop
for conversion of text to audible speech. Jovie is currently under
development and aims to become the standard subsystem for all KDE
applications to provide speech output. Currently, Jovie consists of
the following components:

Jovie
  The KDE Text-to-Speech Deamon, a system tray application that runs in
the background, providing TTS support to KDE applications. Applications
initiate TTS by making D-Bus calls to Jovie.

kttsjobmgr
  A KPart for managing in-progress speech jobs.

kcmkttsd
  A KControl module for configuring the KTTS System. kcmkttsd runs in the
KDE Control Center or start it with the command "kcmshell4 kcmkttsd".

ktexteditor_kttsd
  A plugin for the KDE Advanced Text Editor that permits you to speak an entire
text file or any portion of a file.

khmtl-plugin
  A plugin for Konqueror that permits you to speak all or any portion of an
HTML web page.  (Note: this component is in kdebase/konqueror/kttsplugin)

Original Author: José Pablo Ezequiel "Pupeno" Fernández <pupeno@kde.org>
Current Maintainer: Jeremy Whiting <jpwhiting@kde.org>
Contributors:
  Olaf Schmidt <ojschmidt@kde.org>
  Gunnar Schmi Dt <gunnar@schmi-dt.de>
  Paul Giannaros <ceruleanblaze@gmail.com>
  Jorge Luis Arzola <arzolacub@hotmail.com>
  David Powell <achiestdragon@gmail.com>

User features:
  * Speak contents of a text file.
  * Speak KDE notification events (KNotify).
  * Speak all or part of the text of a web page in Konqueror.
  * Speak all or part of the text in Kate text editor, including
    instances where Kate is embedded in another KDE application.
  * Filter plugins for converting chat emoticons to speakable words,
    fix mispronunciations, and convert xhtml to SSML.

Programmer features:
  * Priority system for screen reader outputs, warnings and messages,
    while still playing regular texts.
  * Plugin-based architecture for support of a wide variety of speech
    synthesis engines and drivers.
  * Permit generation of speech from the command line (or via shell scripts)
    using the KDE D-Bus utilities.
  * Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications
    to generate speech output.
  * Applications need not be concerned about contention over the speech device.
  * FUTURE: Provide support for speech markup languages, such as VoiceXML, Sable,
    Java Speech Markup Language (JSML), and Speech Markup Meta-language (SMML).
  * FUTURE: Provide limited support for embedded speech markers.
  * Asynchronous to prevent system blocking.

Requirements
------------
KDE 3.2 or greater and a speech synthesis engine, such as Festival.  Festival
can be obtained from http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/.  Festival
is distributed with most Linux distros.  Check your distro CDs.  Also works
with Hadifix, Epos, Festival Lite (flite), FreeTTS, or any command that can
speak text.

Optional Components
-------------------
  * The xsltproc utility is needed for SSML support.

See the Jovie Handbook

  (http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/handbook/index.html)

for complete instructions on installing, compiling, configuring, and using
Jovie.

Support
-------
The Jovie website is

  http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd

In addition to the KDE Bugzilla database (bugs.kde.org), discussions for KTTSD
currently take place in the kde-accessibility mailing list.  Subscribe at
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility.  Developers
also hang out in IRC (irc.kde.org channel #kde-accessibility).

Directories
-----------
libkttsd           Library for KTTSD.  Defines the interface for plugins for KTTSD.  Must be built second.
jovie              Application for managing Speech jobs.  Wrapper for kcmkttsmgr plus a system tray icon.
icons              Icon for kttsmgr and KTTSD.
kcmkttsmgr         A KControl module for managing KTTSD.  Run using "kcmshell kcmkttsd".