Jack Heim <jheim@facstaff.wisc.edu> writes: ViaVoice with Emacspeak is the best choice for now. Only available for i386. Flite and emacspeak work too (i386 and ARM). But flite has the disadvantage that it only works for one voice type right now. ViaVoice for instance can provide more different voices, and that makes voice-lock-mode in Emacspeak alot more fun :). My advice is, try to get viavoice running. It delivers the best quality right now, and apart from being non-commercially free only, its very good. I am still wondering why IBM doesn't release different languuuages. The API allows for german, spanish and so on, but its now 3 or 4 years and they did only release english version for Linux. I guess that IBM in really just bought the eloquence engine, thats what libeci indicates to me. And eloquence is good. It would be extremely nice if IBM would release some other languages too. About festival: The reason why you found only vague things is that Festival is simply not the right thing to use. Its a academic tool, and its not the fastest. About 2 years ago I tried to write a speech server for Emacspeak+Festival in perl. It more or less worked at some point, but I realized that its simply to slow and therefore unusable... -- CYa, Mario