I know we just tromped through espeak, but it’s so much fun to hear your computer speak out loud.
If you read that post, you might already have the syntax for festival worked out.
fortune | festival --tts
festival needs a little more attention than espeak did. For one, the tts flag lets it read from stdin, which is what we want for fortune’s output.
If you see this:
Linux: can't open /dev/dsp
don’t cry. It just means there’s a little more configuration to be done. Send a thank-you note to Aditya Arie Nugraha, who had the foresight to paste the fix into a blog post way back in 2008. In .festivalrc,
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE") (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
And with that, it should sing like a bird for you. 😉
festival might be more attractive to you than espeak, since it has better speech output. festival also has some supplemental accents that you can install, for variety.
And I think that’s everything. Except maybe to remember not to listen to all the advice you get from your computer. It’s just a machine.
Inconsolation 
There’s also festival lite if you don’t want to take up quite as much hard disk space: http://www.festvox.org/flite/
Ran across a lightweight e-book reader program using festival lite. It’s called bard and it’s at:
http://festvox.org/bard/
More information on it at:
http://festvox.org/bard/AAAREADME
Currently needs to be built from source. If SDL is built with DirectFB, bard should run outside of X. It currently displays text and ebooks in simple e-pub format. Using festival lite, it can also read the books by converting text to speech. The next version should have support for HTML/XHTML as well. I found it very useful.
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