Are the days of hardware synths and speaking from boot numbered?

[Jason White]

Arthur Pirika  <speakup at linux-speakup.org> wrote:
>I think the subject pretty much speaks for itself.         With serial 
>synths, and especially serial ports getting harder to find, with the 
>only serials synths still being made new are the venerable doubletalks, 
>should work be ramped up on getting software speech, somehow at kernel 
>level? 

There are very cheap Linux-based machines available now, Raspberry Pi for
example. You could buy one, install your speech synthesis software of choice
on it, add a USB to serial adapter, write a small program to process incoming
speech commands and text over the serial port and you thereby have your own
"hardware" synthesizer. The price is probably less than what you would pay for
a commercial product.

You could even do it via Ethernet rather than a serial port, although in that
case you would still need something on the client side that would start as
early in the boot process as desired.

Most (all?) server and workstation boards have serial ports built in, and
there are USB to serial adapters available too, so I don't think serial ports
should be a major issue.