Here is a personal response that I got for this topic. I am sharing the entire message here for general info./discussion as it has good points/experience. However, not revealing the volunteer info. Thanks in advance for understanding. Vijay Yes, it works pretty well. Intonation is odd at times, especially for names, but that's inherent in using a machine to do the reading: it's a really hard problem to duplicate all the rules of thumb a human use in deciding pronunciation. I've fed it plaintext gutenberg files and it works fine. A word of advice: edit out the PG licence and other stuff from the beginning of the file, or it'll take forever reading every punctuation mark and url out: "haitch tee tee pee colon slash slash doubleyew doubleyew doubleyew period pee gee ell aye eff period owe are gee slash" etc. The default reading spead is a litttle slow for my taste, but the timing can be tweaked in various ways, if I read the manual correctly. Another option might be to output to an audio file and run software to reduce the duration of the silences between words. There's speech compression software that does this, apparently, though I don't know a source for it. _______________________________________________ No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com