[Cialug] text to speech

[David Champion]

Just curious what people are using to read text to speech stuff in 
Linux. I'm familiar with Festival. I tried a Firefox plugin called 
FoxVox, but it's not working for me yet (probably a config I need to do 
or something). I'd like to be able to either read web pages, or just 
text files.

I'm having trouble with Festival, when I just do a simple tts attempt 
like this:

festival -tts myfile.txt

It reads the file OK, but it will do some odd skipping, or reading 
different words simultaneously. I'm wondering if it's because I have a 
core2duo, and it's forking parts out to more than one CPU? I've used 
festival in the past and never had that kind of problem with it.

The other issue I have with festival is that it reads stuff too fast, 
and doesn't pause at the natural places (like for parenthesis, and 
punctuation, like this). Maybe that's a setting... or I just need to 
train my ear to the way festival talks.

-dc