I can appreciate the reasons for only including Japanese text to speech in this program. But if Smileboom were to license an existing text to speech algorithm and pass the cost on to users as paid DLC? Would anyone else jump at that?

Most definitely. It would make programs feel more complete and polished.

It would be awesome if they could use the tech used in Tomodachi Life!

yes! for sure!

I don't quite think this is fair. That'd be like giving the JP version Japanese text-to-speech and asking them to pay for it, but they get the English for free. We would have to pay for something we'd use more often, but the Japanese would be given the option of this same product, and they'd get less of an advantage out of it.

That would be fantastic.

It's a little unfair, yeah. But if I understand correctly, the reason they didn't include English speech is because it's much more difficult to do correctly -- English has too many nuances and contradictions in its spelling rules. They would either need to devote resources to making their own speech algorithm or pay to use one that's already been developed. Either way, it would increase the cost.

I guess my point is, it's a feature that I'd like to see, and if cost is the primary obstacle in the way, I'd be willing to pay to see it implemented.

English is very ridiculous, but text to speech could be done. Things like, "tion" and, "sion" are the things that would not be fun. For now, we can use Japanese in the TALK command like so: TALK "ハロ" 'It will say "Hello", just... In a very Japanese accent.