No, I am not talking about everybody's beloved First Amendment. Rather, free speech software with Java. Today a colleague showed me FreeTTS, a free library for adding speaking ability for your Java application.
Actually, Sun has packed its Java Speech API since 1.4, FreeTTS is open source. FreeTTS is a quick download, include that jar in your classpath and voila, you can run the sample code that speaks a String! (and more) Modify the sample code a bit and you can turn it to a textfile reader!
It is great for writing programs for the vision impaired... but how can they click a button on your app? Hmm, who is paying me to write one? Yes, people have written programs to even read any URLs for you. Although I can't think of a good use for this library yet I think it is still fairly fun.
Although this is not quite as professional as things such as Oddcast, http://www.oddcast.com/home/, this is still fun functionality within reach.
Actually, Microsoft Windows provides speech ability from Control Panel too. You can play with that voice synthetizer with Control Panel->Speech.
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