This is a great idea, and I would be willing to serve as a mentor for it. I am the author of PocketSphinx and the GStreamer and Python bindings for it, and was also a main developer on Flite for quite some time.

Perhaps Maemo.org and CMU Sphinx could co-sponsor it? See our GSoc page at: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/summerofcode2010