Pity that it's not that good of a voice, for general purposes, anyway. I'm currently listening to Tom Jones in Windows, using a voice from AT&T called Crystal, which is much better than anything in Linux I've been able to find.

I'm pretty sure AT&T Natural Voices was once available for Linux (x86, anyway), good luck finding it, though

I like the Cepstral voices too, and they're much cheaper (but no ARM binaries, of course..)

I would love to see text to speech integrated into FBReader. The specific use case would be as a way to continue reading while walking or piped through the car stereo while driving. Hopefully, FBReader would continuously indicate the word being spoken on screen by underlining, bolding or changing the color of the text. Even if FBReader just piped the current screenful of text to flite, waited for it to terminate, went to the next page and repeated would be useful, if not ideal.

shame the speakers are so quiet, even maxed out they arn't that loud on my N800.

-Rip

Well, if I was walking I would be using headphones and if driving it would be piped through my car stereo, so the overly quiet speakers (my observation as well on 810) wouldn't be an issue.

This is a cool idea! I can't really think of a way that I could use this, but that's never stopped me from trying a quick hack in the past. Without further ado, I give you a JohnX exclusive "Crappy Hack!"

What you need:
0) some method to be root: becomeroot, openssh-server or r&d mode.
1) osso-statusbar-cpu (search for it on gronmayer.com/it)
2) libxmu6 from: http://repository.maemo.org chinook/free
3) flite
4) My freshly compiled xclip attached to this post.
5) this script: Copy and paste this text into "Notes" on your tablet. Then open the menu, select Format -> file format -> Plain text and save it to the Documents folder as "selection2speech"

What to do:
1) Install osso-statusbar-cpu and libxmu6. To install libxmu6 you will need to use the command line ("X Terminal"). As root type this:
apt-get install libxmu6
2) install xclip, attached to this post. You will need to do so from the command line as root:
dpkg -i xclip_0.08-7_armel.deb
3) When you see the osso-statusbar-cpu app in your status bar, tap on it, then Settings... -> Commands -> New. For Description put whatever you want. For command type this exactly:
sh /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/selection2speech.txt
4) Now try it out. Hilight some text then click on osso-statusbar-cpu, find the command you put there and tap it. A hideous robotic voice should read the selection. If it doesn't work you get to keep this pieces. What a deal!

If anyone wants to package this better go ahead. It won't hurt my feelings, I prmoise.

-John

- ackpht! you are *correct*! tks!

- just finished building the elinks text-only browser for armel and a script to download, modify, and then speak the local weather conditions!

- yahoo! i *love* the n800!

:-)

- the script uses elinks' -dump option... for example, to get a quick market update:

elinks -dump http://us.m.yahoo.com/p/finance?t=ms&tsrc=rawfinance

(dump output to file, sed file, have flite read it, etc.)

Thank you all for your comments they were HELPFUL.

Let's hijack the thread

Johnx how did you built xclip? Especially how did you use the IMakefile to generate the makefile? Did you also port xutils-dev or did you do some steps out of scratchbox? Or you copied some stuffs from your PC to /scratchbox/devkits/whatever?

I'm interested to know how you did it..

Very nice hack by the way!

edit:
I've put xclip in my repository. No need to install manually xmu, it's automagic

It won't work if we installed gnummeric. A note for whoever wants to try this !!!