What's going on with Text To Speech on the XO?

[James Simmons]

I've haven't been working on the XO lately (my basement office had to go 
through Mold Remediation after a flood) but I have been monitoring  this 
mailing list every day.  When I last did any development work on the XO 
it was to create a mostly successful text to speech feature for the Read 
Etexts activity.  Using this successfully would require some RPMs 
installed on the XO that Hemant Goyal was working on for Fedora, plus a 
newer version of Python that resolved some problems caused by 
threading.  What I remember is that if you used threading at all in your 
activity it prevented power management from working.

I've been cleaning up my basement after the tile installers finished and 
there is some hope that I can resume working on my activity, at least a 
little.  I have my XO upgraded to the latest release of Sugar and it 
looks like Speech Dispatcher still is not part of that release.

I'm well aware of all the other work going on with the XO and I don't 
kid myself that this should be a priority for anyone, but if someone 
could bring me up to date on what's happening with text to speech on the 
XO I'd be much obliged.

James Simmons