[Kde-accessibility] Another speech engine for KTTS?

[Jonathan Duddington]

Here is another speech synthesis engine which can be used with KTTS.
   http://home.clara.net/jsd/linux/linux_speak.zip   (200 kbytes)

It sounds quite different from the other speech engines such as
Festival. Although it's not as smooth or natural, it's perhaps clearer
and more energetic.  I prefer it, but that may just be because I'm used
to it.

Would it be worthwhile making it freely available for use as an
alternative with KTTS?

It speaks British English, although there are also superficial attempts
at Esperanto and German in order to illustrate language switching.

It seems to work quite well as a "Command" talker with KTTSMgr.

I note that the KTTS handbook states:
  "Ideally, you should use a command that synthesizes to a temporary
  audio (wav) file, rather than send the speech directly to the audio
  device"

... but I didn't see details on how to do this.  Or why it's
preferable. How do KTTS and the speech engine both know where the wav
file is located?  Or does the speech engine play the wav file itself? 
Currently the speech is output using the portaudio library, which seems
to work well here (using linux kernal 2.6.12).

I would be interested in suggestions on how to make it work better with
KTTS (i.e. not as a "command" talker), if that would be worthwhile.