[ruuk]

hi,

domasofan: Try changing the poll interval to higher values and see if you get better results.

I guess i found the culprit.
it seems that all the time this service seems to generate wav files which are saved to the sd card.
so basically you send a string of text maybe to the espeak command line program.
it generates a wav file and needs to play it back.

can't we just talk to the espeak library?
so we could directly output speech and not use wav files which would greatly redouce pressure on the sd card, the processor and all other things which could create a big lag.
maybe this is also why the service seems to crash after a while.

maybe also speech dispatcher might be useful to use many different synthesizers without the implementation of each synth into the addon.

greetings,
simon

We have a speech-dispatcher backend already. The problems with speech dispatcher is that it doesn't work on all of XBMC's platforms, and it doesn't allow the same control that implementing the engines directly does, and it can't direct it's audio to a wav for playback in XBMC (which is necessary for some setups).

The thing about openelec, is that they have to include the backend in the installation. Sraue chose eSpeak, I believe, because it is available on on the platforms that openelec supports and because it can output to a wav file. I believe we have to output to a wav file because openelec has no audio outside of XBMC on some platforms, and the only way we can output sound is through XBMC by playing a wav. I'm sure ATV2 is one of these, and I think the Pi is the same.

If you can type 'espeak test' in a terminal on the Pi and get speech, let me know so I can add a version that uses eSpeak to output the audio, which I plan to do eventually anyway.

You said the service seems to crash after a while. What do you mean by that. Does XBMC lock up on shutdown, or does the addon just stop speaking, or does it crash XBMC at random times, and if so, how have you determined that the addon is causing the issue? The only issues I've had is with XBMC hanging on shutdown, for which I know the base cause and just need to work out where I'm not properly closing a thread or process. If the addon stops speaking while XBMC continues to run, a log would be useful to determine the cause.

In any case, the addon is still in early development, so many things will be added, improved and fixed as time goes on.

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I also wanted to point out that outputting via eSpeak directly only saves the processing power it takes to read and write the wav file. Since they are generally small and likely cached, they are probably read by the audio player before even being written to disk.