Questions to Help Orient Yourself ¶

My first question is whether you already know and use Emacspeak and are introducing someone else to an already running Emacspeak with which you have experience, or whether you are the new user and must not only learn to use Emacspeak yourself, but must also install it? (I know there are other alternatives, but these are critical.)

My hope is that you are the first: that you, the reader, are someone who already knows and uses Emacspeak and are introducing it to someone else; but my fear is that you are the second. The second path is harder.

I will mention installation again after introducing Emacspeak, talking about some of the underlying notions behind GNU Emacs, and several other matters. But first, I would like to ask you what kind of text-to-speech facility you have?

Are you using an external synthesizer, an internal hardware card for text-to-speech generation or do you expect to use a software text-to-speech package such as eflite or espeakf? I do not have a hard synthesizer, but run both those two software packages. In the installation section, I will talk about them.

Emacspeak was originally written for an external hardware DecTalk synthesizer attached to a serial port. I am told that a hardware synthesizer is better, whether internal or external, and that if you can, you should use one. However, you can also use a software text-to-speech program.

This means that you can run Emacspeak on any computer that has sound, as do most contemporary personal computers. You can try out Emacspeak without first investing in special hardware. However, it is also worth bearing in mind that at the time I am writing this, in May 2005, eflite and espeakf have different virtues. Neither is as good as it might be. For example, my installation of espeakf sometimes restarts its speaking of punctuation after I shift back to a buffer, but not always. On the other hand espeakf has voices, which I really like. All in all, the two software synthesizers are good enough.