Making gnome speak

[Ricardo Fernández Pascual <ricardoF nettaxi com>]

    I have downloaded the festival speech synthesis system
(http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html) and I've found it very
interesting. I can speak in British or American English, Spanish and
Welsh. Some other languages are coming  (Mexican Spanish, German and
others which I don't remember). 
    The interesting feature for gnome is that it can work as a server,
synthesizing requests from any client. The example client is very small
(about 5k stripped). So I have thought that it would be very easy to add
support to gnome-sound to synthesize text using festival. I would be an
option and it wouldn't add any new dependencies to gnome, it would just
test if a server is running and communicate with it. 
    Think in the possibilities: any gnome program would be able to speak
just calling some gnome_say(gchar *text) function. Balsa (or whatever
gnome mail client) could say "you have an email" with the only cost of a
function call, and then start reading it aloud...

    So what do you think?
-- 
Ricardo Fernández Pascual
ricardoF@nettaxi.com
Murcia. España.