This is just a general comment on voice synthesis. It seems that most of the examples here on perlmonks are for win32 and it's voice synthesizer. Linux users can have their own excellent voice synthesizer too, it's called Festival. It dosn't have much of a perl interface right now, but it "talks good". It helps to type your text "phonetically" to get really life like output. For example: to get a realistic "suffering succotash" you might have to enter "suhf ring suh ka tash". But anyways, Linux users don't feel left out of this cool use of computers. Festival