[Cialug] something like OSX /usr/bin/say on linux?

[Bill Davis]

Nathan -

You might take a look at Cepstral's site.  They sell high quality voices
fairly cheaply for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.  They may have some Linux
speech tools, too, I haven't looked.   I just remembered they sold
their voices for all multiple OS platforms.

http://www.cepstral.com/

You can listen to the voices online (requires QuickTime).  And they have
downloadable demos. Be nice to have your machines speak at you in different
voices.  I have my Mac set to speak dialog boxes after an interval if I
don't respond.  Useful in long-running shell scripts too.  Beeps just become
background after a while.  Speech gets your attention.   I also set my bash
login script to say "Hello Bill" and have noticed that helps me identify
when an app is starting a Unix shell in the background to do some task.

For fun, I bought the Scottish-accented "Duncan" voice because, well, I
using a MacIntosh, so it should sound Scottish!   ;-)   (But now it keeps
wanting to wave around a sword and proclaim "There can be only one!"...)

It's fun to play with the non-English voices they have, but enter English
text for them to speak.  It sounds pretty much like someone from that
country/region speaking English as a second language, but with their own
language's accent and intonations.

I have an idea for software to create audio books from text e-books by being
able to specify different voices for different passages (plus for narrative
text) and some smarts to look for things like

"<some talking here>", said Bob

and automatically apply the voice you assigned to the "Bob" character to
that text.  Sometimes authors don't specify who was speaking in long
discussions, though, so you'd have to have some ability to override it and
specify it yourself.  You could even use it for interviews in eletronic
magazines and such, too.

 - Bill Davis
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