You can use winetricks to do most of the work for getting TextAloud to work with Wine. For both TextAloud 3 and TextAloud 4, you set up a 32 bit windows environment, then use winetricks to set up Sapi5(important). With TextAloud 4, you also need to install the dot net framework, the 4.0 version works.

Here is how I configured it:

$ export WINEARCH=win32

$ export WINEPREFIX=~/win32

$ winecfg // this will create the ~/win32 directory and do some setup. Just close the dialog displayed

$ winetricks speechsdk // setup sapi5 (important!)

$ winetricks dotnet40 // displays a lot of errors but the install works. Required for TextAloud 4 only Then to install TextAloud:

$ wine taxxxx.exe // taxxxx.exe is the current TA4 or TA3 installer

or

If you only need it to use that prefix temporarily, then put it in front of your wine command:

WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/first-wine wine somefile.exe

If you can't get sound to work:

Are you running a 64 bit system?

If so, check if the following packages are installed:

lib32-alsa-plugins lib32-libpulse lib32-openal
I found these being necessary for my x64 Arch to get sound in wine.