GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 663960
Speaking an utterance which ends with exclamation point followed by space grinds speech to a halt
Last modified: 2012-01-11 14:35:01 UTC
Created attachment 201312 [details] test case Steps to reproduce: 1. Launch Orca and open the attached test case in gedit. 2. Down Arrow from top to bottom. Results: After the line "What an awesome day it is today! " Orca starts speaking crazy-slow.
Further data in which I can reproduce this bug without Orca. $ spd-say 'hello world!' $ spd-say 'hello world!' $ spd-say 'hello world! ' $ spd-say 'hello world!' When I do that, everything is spoken as expect through the third utterance. After that point the fourth utterance is spoken incredibly slowly. Subsequent utterances are as well. The only way I have found thus far to make speech-dispatcher correct itself is to kill the speech-dispatcher process.
Another data point: If I just ask espeak to speak the file contents via $ espeak -f slowmo.txt There is no slow down. This seems to be within speech-dispatcher itself.
Yet another data point (sorry for the multiple comments): For something totally unrelated, I'm looking at festival + speech-dispatcher + orca. When I try my test case with festival, I don't get the slow down either. So it seems to be speech-dispatcher + espeak. Hopefully I'm done with my bugzilla spam now. :-/ Tomas, your insight as to what's going on would be awesome. Thanks!!
I have tried the above with espeak 1.45.47 which is the latest test version. I admit that when testing it through orca I was reading the test case in firefox rather than gedit. However I tried similar text in gedit just by typing and I also tried the spd-say test. I do not observe the slow down. However I was getting slow downs before upgrading to this version of espeak, therefore I think it is an espeak issue and may be solved in 1.45.47, could others try this.
Michael, thanks for the testing!! I was having problems compiling the latest espeak, but I finally managed to. Initially, I could still reproduce the bug (even after killing speech-dispatcher). But then I ran spd-conf. Now I can no longer reproduce the problem either. So as you suggested, it seems that using espeak 1.45.47 is the answer. Hopefully distros will pick it up soon.
(In reply to comment #5) > Michael, thanks for the testing!! > > I was having problems compiling the latest espeak, but I finally managed to. > Initially, I could still reproduce the bug (even after killing > speech-dispatcher). But then I ran spd-conf. Now I can no longer reproduce the > problem either. So as you suggested, it seems that using espeak 1.45.47 is the > answer. Hopefully distros will pick it up soon. I don't know how long it will take distros to pick this up as 1.45.47 is a test version and I do not know when a stable release of espeak will be made. I imagine though that distros would be reluctant to pick up a test version.
Indeed. Perhaps the maintainer of espeak could do a stable release with this fix in it. Because it's an annoying bug and hacking around it in Orca strikes me as the wrong thing to do.
Thanks, Michael, for your input. As Jonathan no promissed to release a new stable version on the mailing list, I think it's ok to wait.
Espeak 1.46.01 (stable) is now available and seems to solve the issue for the attachment. But things like: def __init__(self): # a small comment g++ -c test.c ||this is some text|| still causes the same problem. It seems to be based on the active punctuation level. follow up report is here: http://lists.freebsoft.org/pipermail/speechd/2011q4/004311.html
Espeak 1.46.02 is now available. I am no longer able to reproduce the additional cases. Thanks.