A Periodic Check on Software Speech Possibilities

[Martin McCormick]

	Is there any software speech generation engine yet that can be
used in a Linux console?

	I experimented with festival a bit and found it to be
promising but I haven't done much more than cat text files in to it
and listen to the output.

	My usual method of access which works extremely well, but
which is not very elegant by today's standards is to use an old P.C.
with a DOS screen reader I wrote in 8086 assembler.  The P.C. runs
Kermit and connects via RS-232 cable to a serial port on the Linux
box.  The Linux box does the heavy lifting while the old P.C. is
nothing more than a talking terminal.

	It may be good to keep such a system around if you tinker with
stuff like I do, but one day, we should be able to have a
self-contained system that doesn't need expensive add-on hardware and
makes use of the existing sound card to talk to us.

	That would be especially nice for laptops where space is at a
premium and multiple serial ports are hard to come by.