Attn: Tony Anderson--Text To Speech in Read Etexts

[James Simmons]

Tony,

I lost your emails but found a record of them in nabble.  Unfortunately 
I couldn't get your email address from that.  I'm hoping that if I post 
this to the devel list you'll see it or someone will forward it to you.

You had expressed an interest in my Activity Read Etexts, specifically 
the Text to Speech feature.  If you tried the current version using 
speech-dispatcher you were no doubt disappointed.  The text highlighting 
didn't work all that well, and installing speech-dispatcher is something 
worth avoiding.

I am pleased to report that Aleksey Lim, as part of his work on Sugar on 
a Stick, has become a contributor to Read ETexts and has made 
significant improvements to it.  He has created a gstreamer plugin for 
espeak that does everything speech-dispatcher did, but does not require 
running a demon or doing any special configuration.  This plugin will be 
part of SoaS and future versions of Sugar.  What is even better, the 
plugin is far superior to speech-dispatcher at generating text 
highlighting callbacks.  It still misses a word now and then but it 
doesn't fall behind.

I have not published this version of the Activity yet because the 
gstreamer espeak plugin is not generally available yet.  However, if you 
are interested in giving it a try I can email you everything you need as 
attachments.

Thanks,

James Simmons