Let Ubuntu speak to you

I discovered that Ubuntu has a built in speech synthesizer called espeak.

From the site http://espeak.sourceforge.net:

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. http://espeak.sourceforge.net

eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods.

It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin.

To test it out right now, open a terminal window and type in the following command:

espeak "Welcome to espeak, how may I help you?"

You can type whatever you like within the quotation marks, so have some fun.

If you'd rather a female voice, then enter this command:

espeak -v en+f4 "Welcome to espeak, how may I help you?"

The -v command allows for different languages. You can find more info on voices as well as all the other commands here:
espeak commands

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