Hi Severine and all,
sorry I can't say, cause I don't know, when or how soon any adapted Palm or
other PDA might happen.  We've applied for grants to start on the project and
the agencies get around to it when they feel like it.

About making things talk, there are two ways to do it.
You can build in hardware speech synthesizers using extra chips.
Foor example there is a "chip set" from the company that makes the doubletalk
series of synthesizers that can cost as little as about $20.00 in large
quantities, and probably about $50.00 in the quantities for our smaller market.

In the real world, if you add $50.00 to the parts cost of a product,
you need to increase the purchase price by five times that much, so
adding hardware speech costs at least $250.00 plus added software work.

If you allready have a powerfull enough microprocessor, say a pentium, on board
then you can use entirely software speech synthesis like eloquence or
the Microsoft speech engine or the new AT&T natural voices etc.

These software packages need a lot of speed and computing time, but don't add
so much to the hardware costs if you allready have a speedy processor on
board.

so devices like the Braille Lite, the road runner and such use a pretty primative
processor and add hardware speech synthesizers.

Everything is trade offs.
Tom


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