Hey there. My name is Adam Bunter and I am the author of Sayz Me. I live in Brisbane, Australia and am a programmer.
Back in 2002 I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Visual Basic and discovered a programming language called Python. The more I read and learnt about Python the more excited I became. Here was a scripting language that was easy to read and encouraged the developer to write maintainable code. Best of all it was open source. So, I was keen to take Python for a spin but needed to come up with an idea for a small, fun project. But what?
One of the occupational hazard of being a programmer is there is lots and lots of reading. I enjoy reading and learning. But trying to focus bleary eyeballs on the latest technical articles after working in front of a computer screen for hours on end can be hard sometimes. Hmmm.... that got me thinking. What I wanted was some sort of utility that would allow me to highlight some text from webpages and then read it aloud for me.
So I started learning Python and began work on the Sayz Me text to speech application. A few years down the track and Sayz Me continues to suprise. The popularity of this voice reader has exceeded my expectations with Sourceforge recording over 90,000 downloads. I still recieve emails from people thanking me from all around the world.
One of the most common questions I am asked is why do I give my work away for free? Aside from feeding the ego, the main reason Sayz Me is free is because I believe stongly in Open Source Software and wanted to give a little something back. If you would also like to contribute I would encourage you to make a donation.
It has been unforunate that, because of time restraints with work and family commitments, I have not been able to do any further work on Sayz Me since 2002. This year I hope to add support for SAPI5 and the much requested "text to mp3" feature.