I've been avoiding QML so far, as it requires even more of a complete restructure of the app than plain QT, but I realize that it won't really run natively on the N9 without it - so that's what I'm concentrating on now. I'm probably going to use two colors for the user and for Saera, and make them themeable.

I downloaded flite and gave it a try. On some words it is much better than espeak, but it seems to stumble over a lot of words that espeak has no problem with (suck as "Tokyo" and most numbers), and I think part of the problem is that it's sort of in the uncanny valley - because it's more human-like, it's flaws are more apparent. There is no flite package for the N9 as far as I can find, so since espeak is working on both platforms I'm considering that a low priority.