Speech synthesis?

Hi everyone! Great to see there’s still a thriving RISC OS community around!

So when I went to school, the school’s computers were Acorn Archimedes A5000s running RISC OS 3.1. One piece of software they ran was Talking PenDown which let the computer read documents to you in a charmingly mechanical voice. I never forgot it.
Having just run across RPCEmu and rediscovered the joy of RISC OS, I was wondering if there was any software available that would let me hear that old fashioned computer voice again. Obviously Talking PenDown is proprietary software but is there anything around that could utilise the same speech synthesis?

Checkout espeak @ http://www.avisoft.f9.co.uk/

Thanks! I actually did try that earlier but just got a text window that says the following:
“| set system variable for speech data
*Set Speak$Dir <Obey$Dir>
*IconSprites <Obey$Dir>.!Sprites”

So I downloaded and extracted it from your link (I’m running RISC OS 3.71 on RPCEmu BTW) but from there I get an error trying to run it – “File Run not found”.

I’m probably doing something wrong, I admit I’m not technically proficient with RISC OS. My main expertise is DOS and Windows and when I used RISC OS before it was just for applications.

did you unzip it from windows or RISC OS? You should unzip it from RISC OS (use sparkfs) otherwise the filetypes are not unzipped properly.

Okay so the first download that gave me the text window, I initially unzipped from within Windows like a dummy, not realising the zip file wouldn’t unzip the RISC OS files correctly if I did that. Re-unzipped from within RISC OS and I now have an app with a proper icon, but when I click it, it now pops up an error box saying, “Application may have gone wrong. Click Continue to try to resume or Quit to stop application”.
Nothing happens when I click Continue.

EDIT: There was also a Describe button. I clicked that and THIS may be more useful: “Internal error, abort on data transfer at &023AFA38”
That looks suspiciously like a memory address to me.

The second download I had unzipped from within RISC OS anyway; that’s the one that’s giving me “!Run not found”.

RISC OS 3.71 on RPCEmu … Internal error, abort on data transfer at &023AFA38

A quick try here confirms that eSpeak 3.50 does fail to start on OS3.71 RPCEmu. It is OK on OS4.02.

An eSpeak 3.17 unearthed from a VRPC graveyard did load though rather amusingly it did not have a !Run file. I copied that in from the version that did.

A quick try here confirms that eSpeak 3.50 does fail to start on OS3.71 RPCEmu. It is OK on OS4.02.

Plain 3.71, or with the !System update from the download pages – wondering whether it’s a CLib version issue. (Non-programmer, guessing)