Festival is an advanced multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is written in C++ with a Scheme-based command interpreter for general control. You will also need to install at least one festvox-* (festival voice) package (infact, the festvox packages are dependent on this package). festival --tts foo.bar will speak ASCII file foo.bar, (SayText "Oh Dad! We're ALL Devo!")