Pluto still classified as an application, and not a dwarf application.
Pluto, a popular news and email client, and speech synthesizer eSpeak, both originally developed by Jonathan Duddington, have been updated for ARMv7 compatibility – and can therefore now be used on modern RISC OS systems based around the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard, as well as the Raspberry Pi.
The BeagleBoard and PandaBoard both use ARMv7 CPUs, while the one used in the Raspberry Pi is actually an ARMv6 CPU that can be operated either in ARMv5 compatibility mode or in one of two ARMv7 modes via the RISC OS configuration, and according to Jonathan it was “on a Raspberry Pi in ARMv7 mode” that he tested the new versions of both pieces of software.
eSpeak, which Jonathan made open source in 2006, changing its name from Speak later the same year, has reached version 1.47.06, and now speaks correctly on systems which have 44,100Hz audio, but not 22,050Hz, such as the PandaBoard for which 44,100Hz is the lowest sample rate supported.
Other than updating it to run on newer processors, the only change to Pluto is that the speech interface has been updated to use the latest version of eSpeak, with latest version of the eSpeak module and data included in the download – and, like eSpeak, the software is now open source, with the source code to be found on Sourceforge.
