With festival, you can make your computer talk to you, and read text
documents. From the command line the format for reading the document
looks like this:

festival --tts yourdoc.txt

Introducing festival to your bash scripts can produce some interesting
things. To have what you type speak without having to open and save txt
files, I wrote a quick bash script.

#!/bin/bash
# Festival Talker Program
# Takes input from the keyboard and speaks the text.
# This keeps repeating until you end the program with CTRL   C
# Created by Dave Crouse 01-16-2006
clear

talker ()
{
echo "         Festival Talker Program";
echo "--------------------------------------------------"; echo "";
read WHATYOUTYPED
echo $WHATYOUTYPED > whatyoutyped
festival --tts  whatyoutyped
shred -u whatyoutyped ; clear
}

while true
do
talker
done
exit

Another script combines Lynx and Festival to speak webpages.

#/!bin/bash
# Written by Crouse @ bashscripts.org
# Visit specific url with lynx and have festival read it back.
# Works best with pages that are text only, without hyperlinks.
# NOTE: Could create menu system and use sed/awk/grep to clean up pages
before reading
# and allow for the script to loop.
#
# Very basic bash script that combines the use of lynx and festival
#

echo "Please enter a url to visit" > enterurlmsg.txt
festival --tts enterurlmsg.txt
read -p "Please enter a url to visit" urltovisit;
lynx -dump $urltovisit > urltemp.txt
festival --tts urltemp.txt
# Remove temp files
rm urltemp.txt
rm enterurlmsg.txt
exit

Now, instead of just a screen with a text, you can have your computer talk to you.

Check out the Festival Speech Synthesis System documentation for additional information.

Authors:

Centre for Speech Technology Research - University of Edinburgh, UK

David Crouse