The text-to-speech program `flite'  

I was looking for a simple text-to-speech (TTS) program similar 
to the `say' command available on Mac OS X. I tried to install 
the `festival' package but it appeared to require components of 
the X Window system, which I do not have installed.
   
The `flite' package is based on festival, but designed to be 
smaller and faster. It currently comes with a low-quality voice, 
but the developers are planning to improve this in future. The 
command can be run with a text file as an argument, or with two
arguments: the first being a text file and the second the name 
of a WAV file to write to. Output can also be piped to flite. 

The following commands will all work.

   flite textfile.txt
   flite textfile.txt wavfile.wav
   w3m -dump thom.freeshell.org/bsd/diary.txt | flite

I run this command as a cron job:

   test -s /var/mail/$USER && \
   flite "You have new mail.\
   Number of new messages, `from | wc -l`"