Hi All, This message is a request for comments, aimed primarily at the blinux-develop list, but I'm Cc'ing the blinux-list in case others might be interested. Caveat: spk2 is in extreme alpha (version 0.0.2), so please be careful. I've been playing around with IBM's ViaVoice Outloud software text-to-speech synthesis engine, and coded up a little command line interface, which I called spk2. It's a substantial re-write of the cmdlinespeak code included with ViaVoice, to take advantage of the STDIO Unix pipe structures, as well as to add a few other options and enhancements, detailed in the README. The individual files are available at: http://www.plumb.org/tekmage/source/spk2/ ...or for the tar.gz file at: http://www.plumb.org/tekmage/source/spk2_0.0.2.tar.gz In short, it speaks any text presented to it via STDIN using the Outloud engine, and echos the text out STDOUT so other commands and/or devices can make use of it. If you have the Outloud engine installed and working then this little program should work as well, however you may need to do a "make spk2" to recompile the binary for your particular system. It's a VERY simple make file however. I haven't had time to explore how to make it more generic yet. All comments, suggestions and bug-fixes are most welcome! I provided some examples of it's usage and options in the README, but being sighted myself, the formatting of the documentation probably needs some reworking for accessibility and clarity. My own interest comes from my activities in wearable computers, where using a visual/GUI interface can easily be more of a distraction than a benefit. That's all for now, Andrew. -- Andrew Plumb, VE3SLG mailto://andrew(at)plumb(dot)org http://www.plumb.org/tekmage/ spk2_0.0.2: http://www.plumb.org/tekmage/source/spk2/