Hugo v3.1 beta

[Kent]

I've put a beta of Hugo v3.1 at http://www.plover.net/~hugo/hugobeta/. There's only a Windows build for now. (Note that if you're going to be compiling something for general release in the near future, use the -30 switch in the command-line to compile for compatibility with existing v3.0 ports. And if there are any problems with that behavior, please let me know.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Nice! Can't wait to grab it and take a look at it.

Hey, I totally don't mean to hijack or anything, but I had a question maybe some other people were wondering about. There's a "speech" option in Hugo 3.07 -- are there built-in voices for that? I tried it out the other night and didn't get any speech, however it occured to me later that I was playing MP3s at the time, and maybe the sound channel was already in use. Are there speech libraries that act as plug-in options for Hugo?


Robb

[Kent]

It uses Microsoft SAPI 4.0, which as I understand it comes (or at least used to come) with a number of speech programs.

It's available from MS's site as a download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/rele ... seID=26299

It's pretty big. There's a smaller non-SDK version somewhere, too, but I don't have the URL; it may be findable at MS's site, as well.

I should've mentioned that this release should smooth out and/or cure some of the resizing/repainting issues people were seeing.

[Lysander]

Ahem. Resident text-to-speech guru popping up here for a moment here. Text-to-speech SSAPI 4 is not, as it happens, all that common; what's far more common is SSAPI5, the program that comes with Windows XP along with the Narrator program, effectively the stupidest screen reading program on the planet. SSAPI4 is juuuust a little less common than SSAPI5. But y'know what? Don't change it. Keep SSAPI4, do oyu konw why? Because SSAPI5 eats sphincter. It comes with only one voice, and that voice is the most ugly, annoying, irritating voice on the planet, not to mention that the program has no inflection whatsoever--seriously, the guy sounds like he's reading War and Peace the entire fucking time he talks. He could put you to sleep while you're reading the script to the patriot. So keep SSAPI4, because 5 is dumb. You may want to put a little blurb about it in the help file that says "this program supports SSAPI4 and does not support SSAPI5 because SSAPI5 is the most terrible-sounding thing in the known universe. If you want to get SSAPI4, go to [pasted link] and download it." Just a suggestion.

[Kent]

Fair enough. Originally when I did a little research into SAPI 5 vs. SAPI 4, I came under the impression that some of the more popular stuff out there was driven by 4. Plus SAPI 4 is considerably more straightforward to work with than 5, is smaller, etc. And now I think Microsoft is onto something else entirely new.

Anyway, I'll make a note of it in the Hugo release notes. Thanks.

[Kent]

The ReadMe already mentions it:

"Hugo uses Microsoft's Speech Engine API 4.0 to speak text. Microsoft's Speech Engine is often included with speech recognition software. If you have not got the engine installed, it can be downloaded from Microsoft from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/rele ... seID=26299. Hugo does not work with version 5 of Microsoft's Speech Engine API."

Hey, I didn't even remember it mentioned it.

[Lysander]

Huh. Cool. Wonder who wrote that in?

[Kent]

The ReadMe wording is a fairly straight poach from David Kinder's WinGlk documentation, if I remember, whose approach to speech integration I ended up basing Hugo's on.