Note:: This project is dead. I don't have time to work on it anymore, and it's likely that others have developed better solutions to the problems this project was meant to solve anyway. I'll leave the site up for anyone who's interested, but don't expect any updates. --Matt Campbell
The Open Interface for Speech Synthesis (OISS) is an interface to speech synthesis hardware and software for end-user applications under Unix. It consists of a program called speechd which receives text and commands sent to /dev/speech and sends them to a speech synthesizer of the user's choice. OISS also includes drivers for various speech synthesizers. It is written in Python, so writing and installing new drivers is relatively simple.
Note: The speechd program in this project is not the same as the older speechd program at SpeechIO.org. This is a completely different implementation, though applications written for the older implementation are compatible with this one.
You may also want to read about the motivation for this project.
To use OISS, you must have a Unix-like system, a recent version of the Python interpreter, and one of the following speech synthesizers:
The current release of OISS is 0.1, which is available only as a source package.
The documentation in the initial release had a mistake in the installation section. The mistake has been corrected and the corrected READMEfile has been checked into the CVS repository.
FOr more information about project development, or if you want to contribute, go to the OISS SourceForge project page.
If you would like to contact me, email me at mattcampbell@pobox.com or contact me on ICQ.