You might see how easy it is to configure emacspeak the way you want (it is readily configurable for types of voice speaking English; but I don't know about the character-to-phoneme translation; that may be buried and hard). See: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/emacspeak/emacspeak.html You can pick up emacspeak via anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/raman/emacspeak