Speaking chat text? (program access to Chat History?)

I am looking for a better way to hear chat text as it happens -- so I do not always have to be looking at the screen, or even have the Second Life application visible. (And... I am not interested in a way to speak back...)

The SL application could call the native OS text-to-speech interface (standard in Mac OS X, not sure about Windows) -- but given other priorities, not too practical.

I am interested in what might be possible with the tools we already have. My current solution works relatively well on Mac OS X, but the implementation is clunky. The program:
brings up chat history
copies all text
pastes the text into TextEdit
determine what text is new
speaks the new chat text

The SL application is kind of a world to itself (really!). The only way I have been able to access the chat history is to have the macro pretend to be a user and interact with the UI. Does anyone know of a more programmatic way to get at the Chat History? (Or for other purposes, any other part of the UI???)

There has been some talk of an SL enhancement that would save chat history to a file. If the file were updated frequently, my program could read the file and speak what's new. That seems like the best I could hope for using current (and near-term?) capabilities.

Any other ideas?

There were also some thoughts in another thread, but they were mostly about enhancing SL, not using current features. /13/7d/6808/1.html

You could do this with an attachment that listens to chat on channel 0 and emails an external application that performs the TTS duties. This might violate the TOS governing bugging, however, so beware. I don't imagine it's a problem if you're relaying chat from your avatar's presence but I don't know.

I had heard of the prohibition on bugging before -- and I just looked it up (excerpt below). I would definitely be "remotely monitoring in-world conversations", so I guess it depends on how one interprets "without the knowledge of all parties involved".

If my avatar is standing in front of several people, or even among a group of 40 at some public event, would I have to tell everyone that I am using a repeater to hear them remotely? Or is my avatar's presence enough notice?

Thanks for the suggestion -- it is easy to try, and the 20 second delay on llEmail() should not be a hardship.

Excerpt from the Community Standards
Examples of privacy invasion in violation of SL Community Standards include:
...
"Remotely monitoring in-world conversations without the knowledge of all parties involved."
...

My opinion would be that you're not getting any information you wouldn't get without the repeater, and you're not passing it on to anyone who wouldn't get it without the repeater, so you're fine. It's functionally the same as someone saying something in front of you and you reading it on your screen. Better ask a Linden though, just to be safe. There are a lot of them so keep asking until you get the answer you want.

if it were attached it would'nt be remote, I would assume.. its on you.