[ale] text to speech on Linux?

[esoteric at 3times25.net (Geoffrey)]

jay wrote:
> A friend of mine is finally making the move to Linux (yay) and one of
> the things that he uses daily on Windows is the text to speech engine
> to give him audio alerts for things. He's looking for a similar
> functionality on Linux.
> 
> Is there anything out there that will take command line input and
> just say it aloud?  I found festival, and this appears to be the only
> viable option for text to speech on Linux...and it doesnt take a
> straight command line argument, you have to put the text into a file
> first, or do it interactively from stdin.

I use festival as follows.  I have a script called text2talk which 
consists of:

echo "(SayText \"$*\")" | festival --pipe

You execute it like this:

test2talk hey you!

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey