Reading the PhatBox thread got me pretty interested in TTS on the empeg. I'm trying to create a simple program for the empeg that will speak out loud the date and time a few seconds after ignition before the player app starts. I'm trying to do it as a bash script with the help of the pcmplay program and setvol. When finished it can be installed as a preinit script or as a modified init and the empeg can say "Welcome. Today is Saturday November 16. The time is 3:09" a few seconds after you turn on the car.

I've already created all the pcm audio files it would need to string together the sentence. I've used the $200 developer version of AT&T natural voices program to do so using the "Crystal" voice, so its a very high quality tts voice. An online demo of it is available at http://www.naturalvoices.com/demos/index.html

So now all I need to do is create the bash script to string together the sentence based on the date and time. I was looking at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/timedate.html#EX51 for info on how to get the date and time, but this just doesn't work under the empeg, probably because it wasn't included with the kernel installation. So does anyone know how to get bash to return the date and time in a script using the empeg? Maybe someone has the date and time command compiled as part of another arm linux package that could run on the empeg?

On a seperate note I could easily create a windows program that would take the empeg database (CSV file) and export prerecorded TTS to pcm, wav, or mp3. I could make it export the name of each artist, album, and title to audio files. I have pretty much all the source code I need to do this in very little time (see my software at www.zabaware.com) It would be minor work for me to read in the CSV file to export all the fields as audio files.

But I don't have enough linux experience to be able to write any useful TTS app for the empeg. But knowing that I volunteer to make a windows program that creates prerecorded TTS audio files based on any set of data, is there any linux programmer out there interested in creating some usefull TTS app for the empeg?