Well, as you know, I'm working on text-to-speech in emptriv. Right now 1.0a3 is performing rather well, but if I see anything I want to change or improve on in the next month or two, I'll hack at it. Getting the pcmplay and sample rate stuff into flite was really a big win, having the shell script wrapper isn't so bad, but if it's causing problems, I'll see what I can do about improving on it.

Hope your time away is the result of something fun and not work related!