"Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is written in C++ with a Scheme-based command interpreter for general control." http://freshmeat.net/projects/festival/ Debian users can just go: # apt-get install festival also related package festival-doc Disclaimer: There is a lot of technology out there already. It is for the user to explore, try and customize the software for individual needs. I created a small 4G partition for my Debian OS which is almost full and perhaps this could be one of the reasons that most ebook readers didn't work for me. Also, my PC is over 6 years old and lacks internal/external speakers. So, I can't try this software immediately, but hope to try it down the road. Sharing this info. here for general interest./info./discussion. Vijay _______________________________________________ No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com