[mh] TTS and playing sounds

[Troy C. <tr...@ca...>]

It's been so long since I've worked on MH and sounds, I've forgotten most of 
it and now need help.  It's possible I just don't have my parameters set up 
right to what I want.  I've been looking through documentation, wiki pages, 
code, etc, but I don't know if I can easily make MH do what I want, although 
it seems intuitive that it should work this way.  I've finally licensed a 
Cepstral voice (Allison, to provide a unified voice between my Asterisk 
server and MH) and want to start using it in MH.

I have MH running on a headless server.  I have two Audreys and currently one 
Linux desktop machine.  All the machines in my network have a common /pub 
directory mounted through which they can easily share files.  The Audreys 
work as expected, but to play sounds on the desktop machine, I just need to 
issue an rcp command to invoke aplay with the path to the sound.  I have the 
TTS going to the Audreys currently, but now I want to add the Linux Desktop 
machine into the mix.  As I start looking into the code, I'm not liking what 
I see.

Currently, when something wants to speak, especially to the Audreys, The TTS 
engine (due to Audrey using Speak_pre_add_hook) will generate a WAV file to 
be played on the Audreys, then later will generate the same text, only it 
goes into the ether since the server has no speakers and is where nobody 
would hear it anyway.

Now, since Ceptral (swift) is a single-use TTS engine, it's much more 
efficient to generate the WAV file first then play it, than to tie up the 
engine while it thinks its playing something for someone.  I would rather see 
the TTS engine just generate a common WAV file (not try to play anything 
local) that all the devices can then use.  In short, I want to expand what 
the Audrey code does for itself to a more generic method that works for 
everything.  I already know that will require a change to the Audrey code to 
not generate its own WAV file, but will probably still be able to use the 
Audrey code that plays sound files.

So now that I've confused everyone with the explanation, I'm looking for input 
on how close MH is to doing this already.

Thanks,
Troy Carpenter
tr...@ca...