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`"

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