> > 1: aAs far as I'm aware, software synthesys ties up a great deal of system > > resources including the sound card unless of course you run a sb-live. How much is "a great deal" exactly..? software speech was possible on my old 386 and even the most low-end pentium runs 50 times the speed of that! tts takes only a tiny fraction of the CPU power required for speech recongition or a winmodem. > Geoff pointed out that you can get a card with multiple streams. There are > a number able to do this. But there are other considerations. Not a consideration at all, 'esd' will happily mix as many different audio streams as you want and play them all through a simple SB16 or onboard ES chip.. just make your TTS output through esd rather than direct to /dev/dsp
