Simply started out as a project by a guy who was tired of high priced
screen readers, and was hunting for something for his sister.  He finally
decided to write his own.  I've registered it, (have been involved with it
since it's beginning) and I can't say I use it all that much.  This isn't
because it doesn't work, but it mostly is written for microsoft products.
As a rule, I use as few microsoft products as possible, so my use of
simply talker is minimal.  It works fairly well when I do fire it up
though.  For someone who likes and uses microsoft products, such as word,
excel, explorer, access and more it would be a nice alternative to the
other synthesizers.  It isn't really all that great as a general purpose
synthesizer yet though.  I do believe he's working on this fact, and with
each release it does get better but don't rely on it as your primary
speech synthesizer if you require speech to use your machine.  It'd work
great for someone who only occassionally needs speech for reviewing their
screen.  This is of course only my opinion, and you're free to try the
product yourself (there is a 30-minute demo available) to see if it works
for you.


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html