It is premature to use speech synthesizers as readers for talkingbooks.  
Keep in mind that the TB program is primarily for entertainment.  
Listening for long periods of time to a synthetic voice, with all of it's 
limitations, is anything but entertaining.  Dialog falls flat.  Names of 
characters will often have to be guessed at.
Extensive preprocessing of text to be spoken by synthesizers can improve 
the final product, but I doubt that we will ever be able to improve 
synthesizers based on todays technology to the point where most listeners 
would find it acceptable.  Now, some day, in the far distant future, it 
may come to pass that synthesizers can be made that sound just like our 
favorite readers.  Then, I'd order my poetry read by Alexander Scourby.
Good luck
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:03 PST