with age advancing I'm getting even more lazy than before and my eyes get tired soon reading a zillion of emails, so I modified my IMAP monitor to use voice.exe so I can ear the subject of important messages while I'm working on other things (true laziness is hard work ;)

The implementation is quick and dirty as system (1, $voicecmd, $txt) or die "Unable to speak!"; but raised once again my interest on text2speech and speech recognition state of the art, obviously Perl side of.

As I understand it, both text2speech and speech recognition are always provided by external programs.

At work I use microsoft so I picked up the above mentioned voice.exe wich is simply a wrapper around System.Speech.Synthesis but I remember eons ago I used SAPI voices.

Win32::SAPI4 matrix is blatantly red but Win32::SAPI5 one looks promising, even being 2005. Not its documentation :(

SAPI5 SDK latest release is from 2022 and its 3895 friendly pages manual after many CTRL-F attempts lead me to something working:

perl -MWin32::SAPI5 -e "$voice=Win32::SAPI5::SpVoice->new(); $voice->Speak('finally hello world')"

I'm not satisfied: I'd like to know the state of the art of software with some or easy implementable perl interface:

• text2speech: I found PerlSpeak-2.01 latest release 2008, pointing to festival (latest release 2015). There is something actively developped? There is some cross-platform project usable in perl?
• speech recognition: what software can I explore to use within perl? Both Linux and windows ideas are welcome but a cross-platform one will be the best.

L*