On 02 Jan, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> wrote: > I am looking at adding speech output to a program I am writing, and > am wondering about the best way to achieve the style of speech (eg. > pauses in the correct places, correct punctuation level spoken, etc) > for this. I know of (heard of, but don't know much about) things like > SSML, would this be what I need to look at? Yes, SSML will give a better chance of using different synthesizers. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis eSpeak supports many of the SSML tags. Although others such as <prosody contour=> make no sense to me. The recently released eSpeak version 1.30 has improvements to its implementation of <break> and <emphasis> tags. <emphasis> is useful to put the emphasis on other than the final word of a sentence. <break time=""> was broken in eSpeak 1.30 but fixed now in 1.30.01. I don't know whether you can use SSML through SAPI5. It seems that, as usual, Microsoft has its own, non-standard standard.