speech-dispatcher: How You Can Help
8 How You Can Help
******************
If you want to contribute to the development of Speech Dispatcher, we
will be very happy if you do so. Please contact us on
<users@lists.freebsoft.org>.
Here is a short, definitively not exhaustive, list of how you can
help us and other users.
* _Donate money:_ We are a non-profit organization and we can't work
without funding. Brailcom, o.p.s. created Speech Dispatcher,
speechd-el and also works on other projects to help blind and
visually impaired users of computers. We build on Free Software
and GNU/Linux, because we believe this is the right way. But it
won't be possible when we have no money.
<http://www.freebsoft.org/>
* _Report bugs:_ Every user, even if he can't give us money and he is
not a programmer, can help us very much by just using our software
and telling us about the bugs and inconveniences he encounters. A
good user community that reports bugs is a crucial part of
development of a good Free Software package. We can't test our
software under all circumstances and on all platforms, so each
constructive bug report is highly appreciated. You can report bugs
in Speech Dispatcher on <speechd@bugs.freebsoft.org>.
* _Write or modify an application to support synthesis:_ With Speech
Dispatcher, we have provided an interface that allows applications
easy access to speech synthesis. However powerful, it's no more
than an interface, and it's useless on its own. Now it's time to
write the particular client applications, or modify existing
applications so that they can support speech synthesis. It is
useful if the application needs a specific interface for blind
people or if it wants to use speech synthesis for educational or
other purposes.
* _Develop new voices and language definitions for Festival:_ In the
world of Free Software, currently Festival is the most promising
interface for Text-to-Speech processing and speech synthesis. It's
an extensible and highly configurable platform for developing
synthetic voices. If there is a lack of synthetic voices or no
voices at all for some language, we believe the wisest solution is
to try to develop a voice in Festival. It's certainly not
advisable to develop your own synthesizer if the goal is producing
a quality voice system in a reasonable time. Festival developers
provide nice documentation about how to develop a voice and a lot
of tools that help doing this. We found that some language
definitions can be constructed by canibalizing the already existing
definitions and can be tuned later. As for the voice samples, one
can temporarily use the MBROLA project voices. But please note
that, although they are downloadable for free (as price), they are
not Free Software and it would be wonderful if we could replace
them by Free Software alternatives as soon as possible. See
<http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/>.
* _Help us with this or other Free-b-Soft projects:_ Please look at
<http://www.freebsoft.org> to find information about our projects.
There is a plenty of work to be done for the blind and visually
impaired people to make their work with computers easier.
* _Spread the word about Speech Dispatcher and Free Software:_ You
can help us, and the whole community around Free Software, just by
telling your friends about the amazing world of Free Software. It
doesn't have to be just about Speech Dispatcher; you can tell them
about other projects or about Free Software in general. Remember
that Speech Dispatcher could only arise out of understanding of
some people of the principles and ideas behind Free Software. And
this is mostly the same for the rest of the Free Software world.
See <http://www.gnu.org/> for more information about GNU/Linux and
Free Software.
Info Catalog
speech-dispatcher: Reporting Bugs
speech-dispatcher: Top
speech-dispatcher: Appendices