I used the program Cool Edit 2000 from www.cooledit.com to write all the PCM files, although I'm sure there are many other programs that can do it also. When you save your PCM files you just need to make sure they are 44.1khz 16-bit stereo. You can open up and listen to the PCM files I created in cool edit in order to find out everything that needs to be recorded. If you setup your windows audio mixer to record "wave" or "what you hear" you can record the output of any program into cool edit. Then you can clip out parts of audio in order to get each word into seperate files.

And I have a few tips as to how to make it as natural sounding as possible. I didn't just record "Today is. Monday. November. Twenty. Third..." I recorded "Today is Sunday January 1st" and then "Today is Monday February 2nd" and then "Today is Tuesday March 3rd" and so on. I extracted the phrase "Today is..." from a sentence that had more words after it. I extracted "Monday" from a sentence that had words before and after monday. I extracted "January" from a sentence that had words before and after it. The engine, like humans, pronounce words differently if it is part of a full sentence instead of just reading the word. To further illustrate this, play my recorded november.pcm file all by itself and it will sound weird, without conclusion, as if it didn't finish its breath and is expecting to say more. But I didn't do this for the numbers so you can record "One. Two. Three..." without making it part of a full sentence.

Since this program is just a collection of 72 prerecorded audio files, it is certainly possible for someone to record their own voice instead of the computer synthesized voice. That would sound so much better then any TTS voice could and I think it would be real cool if someone did that.

BTW, I posted r5 of the TTS Clock at www.zabaware.com/empeg and I mentioned it on the general forum instead now as I think all the bugs have been removed and I included an automatic ftp installation script.