ChromeVox and speech-dispatcher

[S. Massy]

Hello,
Today, I finally got 'round to getting ChromeVox running on my Linux
system, and, so far, my first impressions are fairly positive. One issue
I would like to resolve, however, is that I currently cannot seem to
choose any TTS but Google TTS, a.k.a Lois. Looking around, it seems that
speech-dispatcher is disabled by default (?) and must be explicitly
enabled[1]. My question is, how can that be achieved?
1. http://www.google.com/url?q=https://groups.google.com/d/topic/axs-chrome-discuss/HUAT4HnOmjo&sa=U&ei=HyWOU-m5C8nX8AHdr4DwAQ&ved=0CBgQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNGb0F7wqYAzeZSMKOsovIpb3CH7xg
Cheers,
S.M.
--
Sebastien Massy
Montreal, Canada
Website: http://www.wolfdream.ca
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/SMassy1
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/sebastien-massy/47/5a5/81a
Google+: https://plus.google.com/113474861330993124986/posts

[B. Henry]

You use the --enable-speech-dispatcher option when launching, i.e. put it in to
/usr/share/applications/google-chrome-stable.desktop at the end of the exec line, should probably be very close to the end
of the file, but this could vary depending on distro I suppose.
Sadly, after having this work well with one chrome version an update broke it, (yes, you need to update the .desktop file,
readding the enable... line after each chrom update as it'll be over written), and the last couple of chrome updates don't
work with this and it falls back to a google tts.
You may at least want to get some oteher voices from the web-store. I find several others usually sound better than Lois.
I need to get an older chrome version to get speechdispatcher back working as I don't have enough volume to comfortably
use the google tts's on this netbook.
You can of course just launch chrome with the enable speechdispatcher flag manually, or put a .desktop file in your home
dir, probably in ~/.local/share/applications/
in your home dir it should not be overwritten with updates.

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[S. Massy]

Hello,
Wonderful, thanks!
Cheers,
S.M.

[S. Massy]

Hello,
The good news is that there is some speech output using that option
under Chrome and Chromium 35. However, only text is spoken and not extra
information is provided, such as element type and so forth. Anybody else
experienced this?

Cheers,
S.M.

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 03:11:07PM -0500, B. Henry wrote:

[Deedra Waters]

My own opinion here i wouldn't use speech-dispatcher unless you're
desperate in my version of both chrome and chromium it skips huge
chunks of text. and when i tried installing the google voices, it
utterly chokes and now neither works.


--
Website: http://deedra.the-brannons.com
blog: http://deedra.the-brannons.com/blog

[S. Massy]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 02:18:53PM -0700, Deedra Waters wrote:
> My own opinion here i wouldn't use speech-dispatcher unless you're
> desperate in my version of both chrome and chromium it skips huge
> chunks of text. and when i tried installing the google voices, it
> utterly chokes and now neither works.

Sadly, that's been my experience as well. It would be interesting to
dive into the code and see what's going amiss there. My impression so
far is that core text gets passed on but no supplementary information.

[S. Massy]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 03:11:07PM -0500, B. Henry wrote:

[...]

> You may at least want to get some oteher voices from the web-store. I find several others usually sound better than Lois.

Do you have any specific recommendations? I'm just looking for something
with minimal latency.
Cheers,
S.M.

[B. Henry]

Your mileage may vary, a lot!
I had relatively good luck when I could use speech-dispatcher. It seemed thaat text was much more likely to be skipped
using chromium, but I only used chromium a little on one distro and as I've been using that distro less this year have had
little chance to use it and have not tested lately. When I could use chrome however it worked well with speech-dispatcher
generally. Now it won't run at all however even with the --enable... flag. It always falls back to a google tts so I
don't know if the text skipping has started to occur again or not. It was not much of a problem in recent releases
here however.

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 02:18:53PM -0700, Deedra Waters wrote:

[Deedra Waters]

I'm assuming you got sited help installing the google tts stuff as for
me, it's never come installed with the chromevox stuff. as i said before
this so isn't useful if that's the case, because we have a way to run
chromevox on linux with out sited help to install it but now that
chromium is totally screwed with speech-dispatcher and chrome wont use
it with a google tts, i find myself with no browser period.

[B. Henry]

I've installed tts's a couple ways, once with sighted help, and once installing on a windows instance of chrome using NVDA
and then syncing by logging in to the LInux instance of chrome. OK, actually that was with a couple seconds of sighted
help also to get me in to the email field to start the log-in process.
Then I started using the file posted on your domain and recommending it to all.
This is exceedingly bad news, but I don't have any problem with both that json file and google tts engine/voices on the
system. Not complete silence anyway, but I really want working speech-dispatcher back.

[Chris Brannon]

"B. Henry" <burt1...@gmail.com> writes:

> Then I started using the file posted on your domain and recommending it to all.
> This is exceedingly bad news, but I don't have any problem with both
> that json file and google tts engine/voices on the
> system. Not complete silence anyway, but I really want working speech-dispatcher back.

I wonder if it's possible to install the Google TTS voices using the
same non-interactive method that I have outlined for installing
ChromeVox itself? I bet it is. If the answer is yes, will Chrome or
Chromium come up talking as soon as the voices are installed, or will
someone have to manually indicate to ChromeVox that the Google voice is
the default? I'd love to find a non-interactive method for
bootstrapping a talking Chrome / Chromium along with the Google voice.

Also, since SD is so flaky, is it at all possible to use the Emacspeak
speech servers with ChromeVox instead? They're a stable, well-proven
technology, and I've been using them constantly for around a decade!

-- Chris

[B. Henry]

If there's only one voice included then the issue should be resolved, and there are a couple of flite voices that are
quite clear and much smaller than the google tts.
This would mean folks who don't have reallyl fast connections would be up and ru ning quickly nyway.
Check out the voices in the webstore, I liked the U.S. male the best, but there is a female, and UK as well as I recall,
and they sound much better than the flite packages that work with speechdispatchr in case anyone is cringing.
--
B.H.

[S. Massy]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 03:51:03PM -0700, Chris Brannon wrote:

> "B. Henry" <burt1...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Then I started using the file posted on your domain and recommending it to all.
> > This is exceedingly bad news, but I don't have any problem with both
> > that json file and google tts engine/voices on the
> > system. Not complete silence anyway, but I really want working speech-dispatcher back.
>
> I wonder if it's possible to install the Google TTS voices using the
> same non-interactive method that I have outlined for installing
> ChromeVox itself? I bet it is. If the answer is yes, will Chrome or

Doesn't the webstore require one to be signed in? If so, it seems
unlikely to work. Then again, it works for ChromeVox itself, so perhaps
it would for free packages.

> Chromium come up talking as soon as the voices are installed, or will
> someone have to manually indicate to ChromeVox that the Google voice is
> the default? I'd love to find a non-interactive method for
> bootstrapping a talking Chrome / Chromium along with the Google voice.

That already works with official Google Chrome 35. All I had to do was
install the package, drop the json snippet in the extensions directory,
fire up chrome and ChromeVox came up talking using Google TTS. Chromium
is another kettle of fish altogether; on Debian, at least, it isn't even
compiled with liblois support, so it'll be no-go unless you build your
own.

[Kyle]

I'm not able to find the Flite voices in the Web Store. Do I need to
look elsewhere to find them? A quick Google also turned up nothing. If I
can get source code, or even a json file similar to the one we have for
ChromeVox that works for either the Google TTS or one or more of the
Flite voices, I can package the file in the Arch User Repository so that
it can be installed when Chromium is run for the first time, the same
way I currently do with ChromeVox. Thanks for any help.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
--
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"

[B. Henry]

I've not looked in a while, but searching tts , or i think u.s. English tts or maybe it was voice is how i found them
originally. There was lois, the first voice i was aware of, and then came the u.s. female from google. next i found flite,
female i think it was and soon after the male.
i'll take a quick look and see if i find any or everything. There were new voices in the google tts extension package a
few weeks ago for me, so maybe everything has been changed.. i now see 13 voices in my list, most called google something
or another but there are also the flite voices in the 13.
i'll let you know what i find.
--

b.h.

[B. Henry]

it must have been removed. i tried around ten different searches, and only saw a few non engilsh options and the u.s.
female voice.

the flite voices are called american male and female with a few letters between flite and american.

they are installed and working fine on my machine, so they must be part of a larger package now, or are available from
some other source. On these voices all just installed when i synced my chrome here on arch a few months back.

Wed, Jun 04,
2014 at

10:07:27PM -0400, Kyle wrote:

[Trenton Matthews]

yep? Just to clarify on my end here, there is indeed, no "flite tts" voices in the store anymore sadly.

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[B. Henry]

So, any of you who have working google-tts now: How many voices do you have in the list found in chromevox options just
before keybindings?
To repeat, I show 13, but some are non-english and do nothing when I try to switch to them.
The flite voices appear at the top of my list. I installed them shortly after they appeared in the webstore I think, and I
have no idea as of when they were removed.
I did notice a Persian espeak voice when I changed my search to tts, no language or other key words. I'd sure like it if I
could have my espeak some how, probably not forever, but for this netbook assuming it acts as does espeak here with
espeakup and speechdispatcher volume would be enough higher to make chrome usable with out earphones. Cmdline espeak is
loud enough, so that gives me some hope.

And for the record thelast voice in the list I have appears to be pretty new. It was called niagra a few weeks ago, but
then after an update it's just U.S. English female like another one. It's both louder and clearer/more natural in my
opinion.

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[S. Massy]

Hello,

On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 12:06:42PM -0500, B. Henry wrote:
> So, any of you who have working google-tts now: How many voices do you have in the list found in chromevox options just
> before keybindings?

I have ten Google voices, U.S English, U.K English female and male,
Spanish, German, Italian, French, Russian and two asian sounding
languages. The last three are identified using non-latin characters and
are therefore simply announced as Google when selected. I would very
much like to get eSpeak running under ChromeVox; the Google voices are
fine in terms of audio quality but they are slow to respond. At this
point, for me, without braille and with laggy voices, ChromeVox can't be
more than a cool secondary browser when I hit snags using Firefox and
Orca. Pity, though, because I love I fast pages load in Chrome.

[Kyle]

I only see a single voice in my Chromium browser, and it's the US
English female voice from Google, which I installed as soon as I could
after running with the --enable-speech-dispatcher flag to initially get
speech. Starting the browser, it starts out sounding like the voice on
my Chromebook, but then it changes to a different female voice with
different inflection and pronunciation. Other than this, I have no other
languages or voices unless I --enable-speech-dispatcher, in which case I
now get an alert about it being unsupported, and that I should be using
something else.

As portable as Espeak is, could it not be an extension to
Chrome/Chromium on its own, bypassing speech-dispatcher entirely?
Speech-dispatcher definitely has its issues, and bypassing it in
ChromeVox/Chrome/Chromium would go a long way toward getting a
responsive and fast voice into all versions on all operating systems
that doesn't require a large download, but still sounds decent. At this
point, the only Espeak extension I have found I believe is called
"Persian Espeak," and it obviously wouldn't support English or other
languages. Espeak itself however can speak many languages, although
English is probably its best language, so it makes sense to have an
extension similar to Google's TTS extension that would work with its own
self-contained Espeak that could speak via the same sound API that
Chrome/Chromium uses.

[B. Henry]

I love espeak, but don't want it to be my only option for everything all the time.
I assume the Persian lang extension I saw last nice does exactly what you are talking about.
I did install at least one more extension besides the original us female, but don't remember if it was more than one.
I get the same announcement when chrome/chromevox loads and then it switches to the default chromevox voice.

[B. Henry]

OK, so I have the two flite voices, "american male" and "american female" and one extra u.s. female voice it appears then.
I'll look through my extensions list in a bit and see what it says I have.

[Christopher J Chaltain]

I just checked on my Windows machine, and I have 12 voices in Google
Chrome. 10 of them must be standard because I see the default US female
TTS and the native MSAPI voice.

--
--
Christopher (CJ)
Chaltain at Gmail