This section details the hardware and software configuration necessary for running AS TE R —detailed installation instructions can be found with the source code.
AS TE R currently uses a MultiVoice synthesizer [Tec91], a serial-line text-to-speech device based on the Dectalk 3.0. The MultiVoice provides independent software control on the volume of the speaker and headphone ports. Since this is currently missing from the Dectalk, AS TE R cannot produce directional speech if a Dectalk is used.
AS TE R is implemented under Lucid Common Lisp/SPARC 4.0.2. AS TE R relies heavily on CLOSsupport and is presently running on a SPARC IPC with 24MB of memory. The Common Lisp process communicates with the MultiVoice connected to either of the serial ports, /DEV/TTYA or /DEV/TTYB. It is currently assumed that the Common Lisp process is run on the local workstation.
AS TE R has an Emacs front-end. Common Lisp is run as a sub-process of Emacs (version 18.59.1 or 19), using the Emacs ILISP interface.
Once the source code has been installed, AS TE R can be started up from within Emacs by executing M-x aster. This starts up a Common Lisp sub-process and loads in all of the code, compiling it if necessary. At this time, the voice synthesizer should be connected and powered on, since AS TE R communicates with the device when starting up to make sure that all is well. The user hears spoken messages as each module of AS TE R is successfully loaded.