By Bob LaFave, Tampa PC Users Group
boblala@ij.net

Julia Rolling of Scorpio Software offered E-mail Talker to the TPCUG for trial use to review its operation. I wanted to look at this program because, as many members know, I am interested in both the MS Agent and Speech technology and I have used programs with the animated Agent characters in the past. The features on E-mail Talker can be viewed at http://www.scosoft.com/Product.htm and can be downloaded, 3.55 MB in size, for a FREE 21 day evaluation period at http://www.scosoft.com/Download.htm. After the trial period, registration is required for $19.95 under U.S. and international copyright laws.

Installation went smoothly, and upon Windows restart the program was set to start and run in the background with an icon placed in the Systray. This can be changed under Options with the General Tab if you decide against running the program at all times.

You can determine which gesture the Agent character uses when appearing and what he says. The Character tab sets up which Agent character you use, the speaking voice used, and the font used to display the text being read. With the Time tab you determine if you want the time announced in an interval you choose, with the character voice and gestures also being determined by you. The Anti-Spam tab allows you to set filters with words of your choice so as to not read messages containing objectionable words. Some settings allow you to Preview the settings that you are choosing.

Under Accounts, you set up your Hotmail or POP3 e-mail accounts that you would like to check. There is no setting limiting the number of accounts. You do need to know your basic e-mail account user information during setup. You need to know: email address, your password, the email server name and login name.

After finishing this setup of accounts, I was ready to see what E-mail Talker could do. It is very similar in appearance to the split screen that most users are used to with e-mail programs, a screen to show total messages and another screen to show what a specific message contains. You control what gets read from the header, subject and message content to the body text. Also, you will only get printed text read by the program; text that is contained in graphics is not read. This is actually kind of FUN to listen to. You get to set the voice type to normal, monotone, or whisper. Then you can set the speed and pitch of the reading voice until you can get a voice that is easy to understand and more human than machine in likeness. I had variable results with the e-mail part that can be split into whether I was using it for Hotmail or POP3 mail. I had pretty good results with Hotmail but sporadic use with POP3.

Hotmail worked much as expected and according to the settings I had made during setup. The program correctly got the current mail in my Inbox in Hotmail and read each message that was understandable. If you look at the main screen you can see that there are buttons to either Skip or Stop a message being read. These buttons are very useful with Spam and with some work you can set up the Anti-Spam feature to also stop undesirable messages. POP3 was never to my liking in its operation. I would have three messages shown from the account, and upon checking with Outlook Express I would find that I had other messages not acknowledged by E-mail Talker or find that some messages where incomplete. I worked with support via email, and we never found a reason why I was having this trouble with POP3. Support sent troubleshooting information and files for me to try and after 2 weeks of correspondence I was left with:

I did ask to be included in any testing that I could do with the new version and will write a new article if I am asked to test.

The other features that the program has are announcing the Date, Time, or using the Clipboard feature. By pressing the date or time you get the chosen character to say just what the date and time are as set in your computer. The Clipboard feature allows you to copy any text that you choose to the Windows Clipboard feature and by pressing the Clipboard button the selected text will be read back to you.

This program is what I consider a fun luxury program since it does what other programs are designed to do and adds or deletes features from the programs that we use now. This program adds the use of the Agent characters and voice, but you lose accuracy when checking your mail. I cannot currently trust what is read and would always check the email accounts using the more conventional methods that I have used until now. This would have to be done anyway in this version since E-mail Talker only checks and reads the current contents of the Inbox in both accounts that I set up. The other folders that are in the accounts are not accessible that I could determine. You also need to use the normal method to delete the messages from the server. After I would check e-mail with E-mail Talker and deleted a message, I would still need to use my normal method to delete the message from the server.

I like this program and hope that I get a chance to see improvements in its current operation. I think this program could be very useful not only as a fun program but also more importantly as an aid to anyone with limited eyesight who would like to use some computer features and specifically e-mail accounts. u