8 Voice Lock

See http://tvraman.github.io/emacspeak/blog/voice-lock-refreshed.html for a high-level overview of how Emacspeak Voice-Lock has evolved over the years.

  1. Emacspeak defines a number of voice overlays such as voice-bolden, and voice-lighten that can be applied to a given voice to change what it sounds like.
  2. Voice overlays are defined in terms of Aural CSS (ACSS) to keep them independent of a specific TTS engine.
  3. For each such overlay there is a corresponding <overlay-name>-settings variable that can be customized via custom.
  4. The numbers in voice-bolden-settings as an example:
Setting Value
family nil
average-pitch 1
pitch-range 6
stress 6
richness nil
punctuation nil

Unset values (nil) show up as “unspecified” in the customize interface.

  1. Do not directly customize voice-bolden and friends, instead customize the corresponding voice-bolden-settings, since that ensures that all voices that are defined in terms of voice-bolden get correctly updated.
  2. Discovering what to customize:

Command emacspeak-show-personality-at-point (bound by default to C-e M-v) will show you the value of properties personality and face at point. Describe-variable on these names should tell you what to customize; so as an example:

Put point on a comment line, and hit C-e M-v: you will hear

Personality emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality
Face font-lock-comment-delimiter-face

Describe-variable of emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality gives:

emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality's value is acss-p0-s0-all

Documentation: Personality used for font-lock-comment-face This
personality uses voice-monotone whose effect can be changed globally
by customizing voice-monotone-settings.