I’m pulling fortune out of retirement from bsd-games — again — to flesh out another console tool with an audio component: espeak.
I’ll be quick with this because I’ve been through it before; I find it amusing though, so bear with me.
espeak does basic text-to-speech conversion. fortune generates random passages of text. Mix them together and we have a random burst of wisdom from your erstwhile taciturn computer.
fortune | espeak
Of course, the wisdom it produces might be a little watered down; I’ve seen a lot of what fortune offers and it’s not always top-shelf advice.
So take your chances. If your computer mutters incomprehensible syllables, take it as a sign from the Computer God. If not, take it as a random twist of fate. 😉
P.S.: Take a look at the help flags, if the default voice for espeak is unintelligible.
Inconsolation 
That is cool.
I added this line to my bashrc :
fortune | tee /tmp/speak.txt | cowsay -n -f ${cows[RANDOM%37]} ; cat /tmp/speak.txt |espeak 1> /dev/null 2>/dev/null &
now i can share with the whole room those pieces of wisdom i get each time I open a bash session.
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