Speech interface(FreeTTS and JSAPI)

Alice now has speech capabilities! This is currently a plugin because of the large file size of the speech engine itself. The underlying speech engine uses FreeTTS, which is another open source project. This project has implemented an entire speech engine in the java language with some surprising performance results. The only requirement is that JDK1.4 runtime is installed. The reason is 1.4 gives the speech engine some performance enhancements and uses the new 'Assertion' keyword.

When running the alice gui, certain commands will sound with a distinct mechanical voice. If you are using the CM11A and you turn on monitoring the commands that the interface picks up will be spoken and printed in the console.

Listen to the Alice speech engine here: .WAV .AU

Requirements

Requirements: As of Alice 1.2.0 release

1. The alice.jar file now has the speech libraries and plugin included. Therefore, the command 

java -jar alice.jar
will work just fine.

2. Copy speech.properties into your user home directory. This is because of the JSAPI 1.0 (Java speech API), which FreeTTS uses.

3. To enable speech, go to the configuration settings -> General tab and click the "enable speech" check box. Now, when there is an event you should hear Alice talking.

Requirements: Prior to Alice 1.2.0 release

1. Proper existing installation of the Alice interface.

2. Simply copy the speechPlugin.jar file into the same directory that you have alice.jar located in.

3. Copy speech.properties into your user home directory. This is because of the JSAPI 1.0 (Java speech API), which FreeTTS uses.

The speech plugin uses the Sun java JSAPI speech interface. This is a 100% pure java implementation built around FreeTTS. To start alice with the speech plugin:

For unix: 

java -cp alice.jar:speechPlugin.jar org.wcb.autohome.Main

For windows: 

java -cp alice.jar;speechPlugin.jar org.wcb.autohome.Main