This project is related to a "life hack" of sorts where you get to process more information by listening to it read aloud. In this case its by a computer using the espeak speech synthesizer. One way is to skim text by setting the speech rate rather high and pause/slowdown if anything catches your attention.<p>However, sending large amounts of text to espeak is too fragile. If you miss a bit you have to restart the entire thing. If some parts are uninteresting its not possible to skip through it. But large amounts of text is where espeak is really useful. An audio/video player's interface on the other hand <i>is</i> very good for playback. So I made this, a TTS with (some of) mplayer's playback interface.<p>So I made this. It has evolved quite a bit with my personal use and I now use this much more than anything else I've made. This also means there are some leftovers when I thought the interface would go in a different direction. There's surprisingly little information about designing audio interfaces that I could find (so that I'd have a better chance of getting it right on the first few tries).