are you running a linux environment? I've moved over from delphi to freepascal for some projects and I'm rewriting some components I used to use on windows.
The component is written in Delphi atm but I am porting them sometime over the next few days.
I want it to be cross platform between nix and windows, when on windows using the microsoft speach api and when on linux using festival.
I'm fairly new to Lazarus and Free-pascal development and miss some of the nifty tools I use day to day in the newest delphi. BUt I like the retro feel I get from using Lazarus. Most of these ports are my way of working through the kinks getting used to working with Lazarus.
Anyway, works kinda like this
Basic TTextToSpeak component derived from TComponent
Properties for manipulating characteristics of speach engine - pitch, speed etc)
Function to StartSpeaking
Function to StopSpeaking
SpeachEngine of types {seMicrosoftAPI, seFestivalAPI, seNone}
On windows the speach engine used is Microsofts dynamically linked in the component
On Linux it uses pipes to pipe the data to festival which then does the speach
There is probibly a better way to do it, but I've not looked into it much yet. Maybe GNOME (i'm using ubuntu atm) has a speach api, anyway. If you could tell me what kind of environment your working in or in which the component would need to work in my component might suit you. Its GPL'd of course.