Appointment Reminder - Reading Subject Aloud

[M. Todd Matthews]

Ideally, the sound played as a reminder would be the appointment
subject text read aloud. This would allow for my home pc monitor to
remain off and appointment reminders to be read aloud. Then the
reminder is received without any visual interaction with the PC. Sort
of a talking alarm clock.

In regard to this, I have the following string of thoughts and
questions.

Outlook provides for a WAV file to be specified for an appointment.
However, it does not seem to provide a voice synthesized reading of
the appointment text. Am I missing something?

I am considering generating a custom WAV file that reads the
appointment text. This seems laborious and probably won't follow
through. Any thoughts on tools that may streamline this exercise?

A more ambitious thought is writting a utility that would be initiated
when setting up the appointment; specifically, it would
1) Read the appointment text
2) Use a voice generator tool that reads the subject text to create a
WAV file
3) Places the wav file in a date based directory (so that it can
easily deleted once the date has passed).
4) Point the reminder sound to this new WAV file.

Thoughts? I am software engineer and it seems doable. However, any
specific thoughts on how one may follow through on this utility would
be appreciated (I have never worked with voice).

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

YOu might want to start at http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/default.asp --
this is the home page for the Microsoft Agent technology, which includes
text-to-speech.