KTTS is a subsysem within KDE for producing Text-to-Speech (TTS). It provides a common API for KDE programmers to give TTS capabilities to their applications. It provides some nice capabilities for end users as well.
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.
Long text is parsed into sentences. User may backup by sentence or paragraph, replay, pause, and stop playing.
Audio output via aRts, ALSA, GStreamer (version 0.8.7 or later), or aKode.
User-configurable filters for substituting misspoken words, choosing speech synthesizers, and transforming XHMTL/XML documents.
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 DCOP 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.
KTTS actually consists of several programs:
the KDE Text-to-Speech Daemon, which is a non-GUI application that provides TTS services to applications via DCOP.
a GUI application for configuring and controlling kttsd. kttsmgr sits in the system tray.
A plugin for the Konqueror web browser that permits you to speak all or a portion of the text on a web page.
A plugin for the Kate text editor that permits you to speak all or a portion of a text file.
In addition to the KDE Bugzilla database ( http://bugs.kde.org/ ), discussions for KTTS 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).
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