On-line Orpheus manual

The software includes computer software, associated media, Braille, cassette or print materials and any electronic documentation. The software is licensed and not sold. The software is protected by copyright laws, international copyright treaties and intellectual property laws. The software is licensed for a single user only unless a site license has been purchased where the number of concurrent users is restricted to that purchased.

Notice

Orpheus, Hal, Cicero, Supernova and SAM are trademarks of Dolphin Oceanic Ltd. Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Warranty & Disclaimer

Dolphin warrants that the media on which the software is distributed are free from defects and will replace defective media at no charge. Dolphin gives no warranties with respect to any bugs or errors in the software or to its fitness for a particular purpose. Any liability, consequential or otherwise, will be limited to the amount paid for the software. Please inform us of any bugs or features you may find and we will endeavor to rectify them.

N.B.

You should save your work and make regular backups, particularly before installing new software or hardware.
Due to the many possible hardware configurations and inherently complex nature of software, errors do occur.

Care of your compact disc

Do not put your disc in direct sunlight.
Avoid high heat and humidity.
Handle your disc carefully to avoid scratching it.
Never stick labels on your disc.
Never write on your disc.
Keep your disc in the supplied case when not in use.

Introduction

Orpheus is the software speech synthesizer from Dolphin. Orpheus is designed to give you all the flexibility of a hardware synthesizer, but uses the computer's internal sound card, so there are no extra cables or hardware boxes.

Orpheus runs under Windows 95, 98 and Windows NT on a 166 megahertz Pentium processor or above with any SoundBlaster 16 compatible sound card.

Orpheus is also compatible with Dolphin's Synthesizer Access Manager (SAM) which is always supplied with Orpheus, and is freely available from Dolphin web sites. SAM allows sharing and selection of a speech output device by one or more applications or screen access products.

Orpheus behaves like any other SAM compatible synthesizer.

So, to use Orpheus with Hal for instance, install Orpheus and select Orpheus from the list of available synthesizers in Hal. Orpheus should operate in exactly the same way as any other synthesizer through Hal.

1 Installing Orpheus

Orpheus is supplied alone or with Dolphin talking applications such as Cicero and screen access systems such as Hal or Supernova.

If you have purchased software including Orpheus on a CD, just insert the CD in your drive and the installation will begin. If it doesn't:

Press CONTROL+ESCAPE to bring up the Windows Start menu.

Press R to select the option "Run…".

Type x:\SETUP, where x is the drive letter of your CD-ROM drive, and press ENTER to start installation.

The installation will talk you through using Orpheus on the CD or any SAM compatible synthesizer you already have installed. If you have no existing compatible synthesizer, the installation will always speak using Orpheus on the CD. Just follow the instructions.

If you are installing Orpheus and SAM from a floppy disk a speaking installation is available if you have SAM and a SAM compatible synthesizer already installed.

Tip

If you do not already have SAM installed, install SAM first. This installation will not speak, but beep when user input is required. Secondly install Orpheus which will speak using the installed SAM.

2 Configuring Orpheus

To configure Orpheus, choose the Configure option from the Orpheus sub-menu of the start menu. This will call up a dialogue box where you can select various options. You may also call up the Orpheus configuration dialogue box using the Configure option in SAM.

From the configuration dialogue box you may:

Alter the sample rate of the synthetic speech.
Load and install new languages.
Adjust the volume of sound effects relative to the speech.
Turn speech off altogether.
Turn the audio mixer on or off.
Reapply default settings.
Call up the Orpheus "About" box.

These controls are configuration controls, and take effect the next time you start Orpheus. If you are altering the configuration settings from SAM, Orpheus will be restarted automatically for you.

2.1 Sample Rate Selection

A pair of radio buttons offers sample rate selection. At the moment, the choice is either 11.025 kilohertz or 22.050 kilohertz. The higher the sample rate, the clearer the speech. However, more processor time is needed to process the higher rate.

2.2 Language Installation and Update

The Install Languages button allows you to install and update the languages used by Orpheus. You can add new languages, supplied on floppy disk, while Orpheus is talking from your screen access software.

Insert the floppy disk and select the Install Languages button (or press L) from the configuration dialogue box. Then enter the name of the floppy device or folder to which the language files have been downloaded and press the Enter key. If you are using a floppy disk in drive A: then you just press the Enter key. A list of the available languages is then given; to install all of the language files select the copy button and press Space.

Note: You may need to restart your system for the new language to become available to the talking application.

2.3 Sound Effects Volume

A slider control adjusts the volume of sound effects relative to the speech. Sound effects are used by screen access software for marking the position of capital letters for instance. Select the sound effect via the screen access software's control panel.

2.4 Speech On

This check box operates like the On/Off switch of a hardware synthesizer.

2.5 Mixer On

Orpheus includes a Windows 95 utility for mixing the speech of Orpheus with your system WAVE sounds. This box controls whether Orpheus will start the mixer or not the next time Orpheus starts. Clearing Mixer On while Orpheus is running leaves the mixer in operation until no applications are playing sounds or the system is restarted.

Using the mixer you will be able to hear any system sounds that you have set up, for instance to indicate opening windows, or the arrival of email alongside the speech.

The mixer does not operate under Windows NT. If you have DirectX installed read the notes in the Tips and Trouble Shooting section regarding the mixer's operation.

2.6 Restore Settings

This button restores all settings for the configuration box to their defaults:

Sample rate at 22 kilohertz.
Speech enabled.
Mixer disabled.
Sound effects volume 40%.

2.7 About

The About button in the configuration box calls up a dialogue displaying the version and registration information of Orpheus. This information may be needed if you call Technical Support.

3 Orpheus Controls

Orpheus offers a full range of controls for your screen access software to use. Controls are made available via the SAM interface to the talking application or screen access software. Most of these will offer all, or a sub-set of these controls to the user via a control panel or in some other fashion. Consult your screen access product data for more information on how it alters synthesizer controls.

3.1 Basic Control

The following are the basic controls expected of any synthesizer and their effect needs no explanation.

Speed.
Pitch.
Volume.

3.2 Presentation controls

The following controls augment the presentation of the spoken text by your screen access software.

Inter-word pause, Insert a specified pause between each word.
Inter-phrase pause, Insert a specified pause between each phrase.
Pause, Insert a specified pause.
Spelling, Spell words or numbers. 123 says one hundred twenty three unless spelt when it will say one two three.
Hypermode, When set omits articles (a, the,..) and function words (to, by,..) useful when quickly reviewing text.
Sound effects, 16 sound effects which your screen access software can assign to particular functions, such as capital letter indication.

3.3 Voice Effects

The following can be used via your screen access software to create voices and augment the different importance of types of text or message being spoken. If your access software lets you change these, you may create different or unusual voices associated with types of text allocated by your screen access software.

Prosody, Controls the excitability of the voice.
Balance, If you have a stereo sound system and speakers you may be able to get your screen reader to associate left right position with different voices.
Language selection, Switches the synthesizer language.
Speaker selection, Male or female.
Voiced pulse selection, Alters the sound of the voice.
Voiced pulse length, Alters the sounds of the voice.
Breathiness, Can make the voice more like a whisper.

4 Tips and Trouble Shooting

4.1 General

Orpheus uses the computer's sound output system to play the speech it has synthesized. This is normally perfectly adequate, but it is important to be aware of some limitations of the sound system. Unless you are using the Dolphin mixer, other sounds may be blocked while you are using the synthesizer.

4.2 Performance

On some machines running Windows 95 with older floppy drivers, when a floppy is starting up then the floppy driver can take up 100% of the processing time, blocking all other processes for a few seconds. This may cause the speech to appear to stutter. This effect has not been observed on Windows NT or Windows 98 systems. If you get this on Windows NT or 98 please let us know.

A similar although less drastic effect has also been observed in other similar circumstances, for instance when first starting some SCSI scanner drivers in Windows 95.

If your machine is sluggish when using Orpheus, try using the 11KHz sampling rate option in the Orpheus control panel. You may need to restart your talking software or system before the change will take effect.

4.3 Mixer and Direct Sound

If you have Direct Sound installed you may experience problems using the mixer. The mixer mixes the wave channel output, such as that from Orpheus, with any other wave channel output such as system sounds. Direct Sound circumvents this system, and incidentally, includes a mixer of its own. In a system with Direct sound, system sounds are still played as wave channel output and may not be played or mixed by the Direct Sound system.

You may still be able to use the Dolphin mixer to hear the system sounds but will have to disable some or all of the Direct sound system for it to be guaranteed to work, as follows.

When you install DirectX into Windows 95 or you have Windows 95 OSR2.5 it causes ActiveMovie to become the default wave audio player. If you want to mix these sounds with the synthesizer output, then in Windows 95, set the default program for opening wave (WAV) files back to Sound Recorder to overcome this problem.

Under Windows 98 there is a Hardware Acceleration slider in the multimedia properties for the wave output device and this can be reduced until the mixer works with Active Movie. Additionally, if you experience any other problems running the mixer in Windows 98 this is always a good course of action and may solve the problem.

4.4 Hardware mixing

If you have a PCI sound card, notably a SoundBlaster Live or one based upon the Aureal 8820 chipset, then you already have hardware mixing ability. In this case the mixer will run but not actively mix with the sound system until the device runs out of hardware mixing channels.

Please note that it appears that not all PCI sound cards have the ability to mix in hardware, for instance, the SoundBlaster PCI-128. However, if you have hardware mixing we recommend that you use that instead of the software mixer.

Orpheus has to use the computer's sound output system to play the speech it has synthesized. This is normally perfectly adequate, but it is important to be aware of some limitations of the sound system.

Unless you are using the Dolphin mixer when it becomes available, other sounds will be blocked while you are using the synthesizer.

A similar although less drastic effect has also been observed in other similar circumstances, e.g. when first starting some SCSI scanner drivers in Windows 95.

5 Orpheus Language Update

The separate floppy disk or disks that may be distributed with Orpheus contain one or more language files for Orpheus. Install these using the Orpheus control panel as follows.

To install:

1. Call up the Orpheus Configuration dialogue box: either run the Orpheus Configuration program from the Dolphin Orpheus folder of the Start Menu, or call up the SAM Control Panel and choose Configure when Orpheus is highlighted.

2. Press TAB until you reach the Install Languages button and press SPACEBAR.

3. In the Path to Languages to Install edit; enter the name of the disk (a:\ or b:\) of this disk.

4. Tab to the OK button and press spacebar to start the installation process.

5. Select the Copy button and press SPACEBAR.

6. Close the Orpheus Configuration dialogue box (and SAM Control Panel if necessary).

In order for the new languages to take effect, it is necessary to restart Orpheus. The easiest way to do this is to quit SAM and restart SAM.

7 Technical Support

There really isn't much more to say about Orpheus, if you have problems, please contact the Technical Support and they will be only too glad to assist.