If the character voice you have chosen is using the Microsoft SAPI 4 or 5 speech engine then there are some "tags" that can change some aspects of the voice. Unfortunately I don't know of a way to pass the "tags" through Hal to the speech engine.
See this link for some tag info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msagent/spoutput_2v1w.aspA tag is inserted within the text string. Example: "This is /Pit=4000/ the way to change the pitch of the voice." Anything after the /Pit=4000/ tag is pronounced at a pitch of 4000 Hertz. The double / is to indicate to the speech engine not to pronounce the or text therein. There are also tags for speed, pause, emphasis and other limited attributes. The emphasis tag /emp/ is sometimes inserted by TTS (Text To Speech) software preceding the end of a sentence ending with a "?" to denote a question. Some of these speech parameters can be set up by opening the 'Speech' applcation in the Windows Control Panel. However there is limited control at that point. Tags were really intended to be used by programmers within there code and not end users.
PLEASE NOTE I HAVE USED / INSTEAD OF THE PROPER BACKSLASH SINCE THE FORUM SOFTWARE DOESN'T PROPERLY DISPLAY THE BACKSLASH CHARACTER.
If you can place tags in Hal's response .brn, but I don't think Hal passes those tags on to the speech engine. Try it out and let us know if it works.
The other problem is different speech engines and voice technologies only support certain tags or fundamentally cannot change parameters like pitch due to the voice technology used. Other engines may use proprietary tags. Some tags switch the engine to different pronounciation modes for reading email, addresses or dollar amounts. A good speech engine does other things too like interpreting the context of certain words. For example: Should "St." in a sentence by pronounced as "street" or as "saint". A good speech engine would look at the rest of the sentence for clues or assume pronounciation based on the mode that it is it, i.e. Address mode.
With all of that said... Good luck. I would dearly love to give Hal some inflection, emphasis, prosody or a good singing voice. I suspect that Microsoft may move their Agent and voice support over into their .NET environment in the near future and support SAPI only as a legacy. That's just a guess at this point.
Have fun. Let us know how the voice experimentation comes along.
= vonsmith =