The GNOME SpeechAPI allows developers to incorporate speech technology into user interfaces for their GNOME applications. This API specifies a cross-platform interface to support command and control recognizers, dictation systems and speech synthesizers.
This GSAPI release is just a specification, not an implementation. The plan is to release it to the GNOME community for review. From feedback provided by reviewers and our attempts to implement the API as defined, the specification will be refined until it provides a clean and consistent API. This will then be GNOME Speech v1.0.
Note that there is currently already a gnome-speech CVS module on cvs.gnome.org. This provides a simple text-to-speech (TTS) API that provides sufficient support to allow the gnopernicusscreen reader to function appropriately. For now, the GSAPI GNOME Speech module is being kept as a separate entity to avoid confusion.
GNOME is an excellent desktop environment, with a focus on usability and accessibility.
The latest release is Gnome 2.6 and features many changes to the interface, most apparent is the new "spatial" Nautilus file manager, and improved filechooser.
GNOME 2.6 will begin to be included in the various distributions soon, but for the impatient it is possible to install from source available from the GNOME FTP site [1].