/usr/bin/say linux

Anyone who has spent any time fiddling with OS X on the command line will have discovered /usr/bin/say, and incorporated it into a few shell scripts to provide background notifications ("build complete", etc).

While Linux doe snot provide this command out of the box, there is a package called festival which provides text-to-speech capability:

apt-get install festival festival-freebsoft-utils

The usage is quite straightforward:

echo "this is only a test" | festival --tts

A simple alias can be used to replace /usr/bin/say on the command line:

alias say='festival -tts'

A more script-friendly solution would be to create a small wrapper script that passes /usr/bin/say arguments (filenames or STDIN) to festival:


#!/usr/bin/env ruby                                                             


def say(str)
  `echo '#{str}' | festival --tts`
end


if __FILE__ == $0
  say(ARGF.read)
end