Mac's I know have the "say" command that will read you whatever you type. I once wrote an quick script that would apply the function to a file and read it for you before I read that you can use the -f option to do that automatically. Also in the first pull down menu of mac applications you can select "services-speach-start speaking text" that will just read whatever's in your application. You could easily set the start speaking text option up to a shortcut key combination to make it easier.

I'm not much of a windows user anymore so I don't know of any tools on widows that might have this functionality. There could be a market for an email app. or browser plug in that would do this for you in windows.

Two of the limitation of a computer reading to you is one, speech is a lot slower than reading, and two the voices can be quite monotonous making it difficult to focus on while multitasking.

I've heard of some really interesting software for the blind that reads the contents of whatever they're "observing" at an accelerated pace. Apparently your ears can adjust to an extremely accelerated rate of speech making the process of hearing the text on your computer closer or even faster than the speed of actually observing it. Imagine writing software without a monitor! If you could get people to learn this skill we might be able to read our RSS feeds (or emails) much faster!

Something somewhat related to this is voice recognition. There is a lot of good software out there that can translate what you're saying into words, it should be hooked up to the operating system so I don't have to use a mouse and keyboard so much! When I visited MSFT on a job interview I talked about this with a guy who worked on related things. He felt that the technology was still a long way away. Prove him wrong!

Many a time, i get long mails and i just cannot help but to skip things. So wont it be good to embed a voice based email reader which will do a secretary's job by reading it to you when u carry out other talks? Whats the hard part in implementing this? Has anyone implemented this one?

It would be nice if you would use a more descriptive subject line...