Speech Daemon project comes to provide a device independent layer for speech synthesis. It should provide a simple interface for client applications (applications, that want to speak) as well as for device driver modules (for particular speech synthesis).

High quality speech synthesis has been available for a long time and now it's usable even by ordinary users on their home PC's. It comes sometimes as a necesity, sometimes as a good feature for programs to provide speech output. There is a wide field of possible uses from educational software, through specialized systems (hospitals, laboratories) and friendlier user interfaces to software for our visually impaired fellows. This is exactly where Speech Deamon came from.

Ordinary users don't meet speech synthesis too often and I would say that it's power is often underpreciated. But for blind people it's one of the few ways how to communicate with computer. They are living with speech synthesis each day so it should be no surprise that it were they who realised for the first time that the current situation with speech synthesis on the GNU/Linux system is a great chaos.

There are different speech synthetisers with different capabilities. Some of them are hardware, some of them are software. Some of them are Free Software and are available on the internet. However, none of them is preinstalled in one of the widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Programmers have really hard times when they want to make their program speak because they need to find some suitable synthetiser (long hours of experiments and so on... ) and then make it work with their program. They often need to write output device drivers for these programs or hardware devices and are doing it again and again. You can imagine it all fails when an innocent user executes two programs with speech output at once -- if they even start both (what I doubt), they will be shouting one over the other. This makes it very hard for programmers to insert speech support to their programs (for blind users or simple for making better user interface) and it's one of the reasons we still don't fully exploit what speech synthesis technology offers.

In an ideal world, programmers could use similar commands for speech synthesis as they do for normal text output (printf, puts, ...). In an ideal world, there would be some speech_printf() that would take care of saying your message in the right time without interumping others, without you beeing obligated to take care of how exactly the communication with speech synthetiser is implemented and without you having to worry about which synthetiser to use and if it's available. In an ideal world, there would be some speech synthetiser in each GNU/Linux distribution and some speech deamon taking care of all applications that want to speak, allowing user to configure speech parameters and providing simple interface (as speech_printf()) through some shared library for programmers. It will be a long way until we archieve this state of things, but with Speech Deamon, we are taking the first steps...