ssip: Purpose
1.1 Purpose
===========
Speech Synthesis Interface Protocol is a device independent layer for
speech synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most of
the output-related tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled
applications. What is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech
Synthesis Interface Protocol is to speech synthesis.
Up to now, the applications that wanted to implement speech output
had to handle all the device dependent aspects of communication with
different speech synthesizers themselves. Speech Synthesis Interface
Protocol (SSIP) aims to provide a totally independent abstract set of
commands by which different applications can talk to some central Speech
Server installed on the system that than talks to the synthesizers
themselves. This way, user applications don't have to care about the
particular synthesizers available on the system and the synthesizers
don't have to care about the installed user applications.
SSIP is not only a device independent language for speech synthesis
related requests, but also a mechanism to coordinate the interaction and
conflicts between different clients' needs in a central place in the
system. Through the priority system, the central Speech Server that
implements SSIP can decide which messages are considered the most
important at any particular time and say them, while possibly supressing
others.