Well I am what I consider to be a master troll. A troll is a person who watches a email group or news group but never really posts unless goated into it. Well my time has come once again to speak up. No pun intended. I am recieving my BS in Computer Software Engineering and I far surpass my sighted class mates in ability so hopefully once August 3 comes and goes I will be able to contribute more to this project. Right now I am fully in Gear to finish school however so I am not able to help like I would like. My idea on software speech is to do exactly what one has already hinted wowards and that is well create a software synth that is free currently the easy and compact ones to use are VIA voice and even Dec talk software speech for Windows. There is also festival but it is a big pig and is not pretty to use. What I would like to do is make a morecompact via voice or dectalk style speech that only has one voice like double talk. something like the old SAM for C-64 but that will start working as soon as all initialazation is completed true we will miss boot up messages but in Linux that is not a crime in fact most of the sighted people I know don't sit there and stair at them because you can usually get into linux and check the messages from previous boots unlike windows 98. As long as the speech came up when the user prompt came up that would be perfect. I have not really been able to dive into Speakup code and really get my feet wet but I think that What has been begun can be well um worked to make this possible. I want to say though what has been done so far is very impressive and I don't think any one should expect Kurt to recode his whole system in fact I think I would rather a system that finally works for lets just say double talk pc than a system that never gets to the point where we can use it. Its not that hard to rus out and buy a double talk pc and that would finally be a perfect solution to get us all out of windows and into an operating system we can all well re-engineer the way we want. So stop begging for Software synth and work on getting the system to work as is first. ASAP and WINDOW-eyes and JFW didn't just come up working supporting every means of software and hardware synth. I used a computer for 8 years before that was even possible. I am sure we can live with a couple more years of needing hardware to support our system. Ken Perry /System Admin www.valhalla.com
