Is it possible to make iChat read out loud conversations as they happen?

Question

Lately I've been using iChat for some time and sometimes it's boring to switch windows to read the next text. Snow Leopard (and other Mac OS X versions) has a text to speech feature, but I see it only works for selected text and pressing a combo key.

Is it possible to somehow hack iChat to read out loud automatically the incoming text from a chat window? Bonus points if you can make different people use different voices (one being a chipmunk).

Answer 1

In the iChat preferences under the Alerts panel you can select the event Message Received, then check the box underneath that says Run an AppleScript script: and use AppleScript to change the voice depending on user and speak the message.

using terms from application "iChat"
   on message received theText from theBuddy for theChat
      if (theBuddy = "Joe") then
         set theVoice to "Bubbles"
      else 
         set theVoice to "Bruce"
      end if
      say theText using theVoice
   end message received
end using terms from

Unfortunately, there is no chipmunk voice included with osx.

Edit:

Fortunately, there's a way to emulate the chipmunk voice. :)

if (theBuddy = "Joe the Chipmunk") then
   say theText using "Bruce" pitch 75 speaking rate 250
else 
   say theText using "Bruce"
end if