The landscape of open source speech synthesizers is growing richer. The
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), partner in
the Network of Excellence HUMAINE on emotion-oriented computing, has
decided to release its emotional text-to-speech synthesis system MARY as
open source.

The system can be downloaded from http://mary.dfki.de

MARY is a multi-lingual (German, English, Tibetan) and multi-platform
(Windows, Linux, MacOs X and Solaris) speech synthesis system. It comes
with an easy-to-use installer -- no technical expertise should be
required for installation.


What i liked best is the emotional speaking plugin to play around. Brings up a feeling of c64 speech synthesis but with emotional blendings, great thing to automatically generate the swearword of the day or to motivate yourself by letting mary say how wonderful your work is, repeating for hours.

http://cling.dfki.uni-sb.de/emospeak

Just forwarded to my by Frank Osterfeld:

http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=154

Announcing Leaftag, our desktop tagging framework. This is an evolution of the original prototype we created, originally named fstaglib (isn’t leaftag just so much better?).

The main part of Leaftag is a library called (oddly enough) libleaftag, which interfaces with the tag database. It’s GObject-based, and the API is quite small. It can tag anything with a URI.

There’s tagutils, a small app used for working with tags and files. It is able to tag and untag files, list all known tags, list all files with a specified tag, and manipulate tag properties (such as icons and descriptions). It also includes some symlinks that provide shortcuts to common tagutils functions (tag, untag, tagls, tags, and tagprop).

leaftag-python contains Python bindings for libleaftag. It simplifies the already simple libleaftag library.