So, you've already got this nice thing that frames speech with a GUI, originally intended for "thoughts." I think it could be used for more than that. I would like to suggest a handy check box, "Use bubbles for all speech." I would use it in all of my games to set speech apart from complex backgrounds and make it easy to read; in my opinion, outline shadow text really doesn't achieve that quite so well at high resolution.
Sounds reasonable enough, I'll add it to my list.
More color choices (such as from hi-color or true-color palette) for speech text would be nice also.
That's already supported - just find out the colour number from the Palette pane and type it in as the character's talking colour.
Eeeeexcellent! ;D