now since we know that openoffice and things like that can work on regional languages (can some one give me more info on that).
yes, i think we have some GUI translations for hindi, tamil, bangla and punjabi..
look forward for that email. mean while, I will like to know as to how much development has taken place in festival voice synthesizer in regional languages.
i knew of a guy (who studied with me in college) and created an ms windows based tool. it used MS speech SDK to read devanagri text. last i knew, he had setup a company, and was selling this commercially. (his company is also into other services, btw)
I am not aware of any equivalent in FLOSS world.. however, we do have speech synthesis tools and libraries like festival, (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/)
So, the quickest way to get this working would be to define lexicons for some desi languages to one of such existing TTS tools. Since Indian languages have an umambiguous pronunciation of a written expression, this could actually be simpler than it is for a language like english or french.
If you are keen to work on this, I would suggest you speak to the relevant people at University of Edinburgh, get some funda on adding new language to festival.
who knows, (if they have the budget etc) you MAY even get some funding for this work.