Free speech and debate software for linux

eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and potentially other languages.
eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds quite different. Its perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods.
eSpeak project can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin. It works well as a "Talker" with the KDE text to speech system (KTTS), as an alternative to Festival for example. As such, it can speak text which has been selected into the clipboard, or directly from the Konquerer browser or the Kate editor.
- Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
- Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
- Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
- Potential for other languages. Rudimentary (and probably humourous) attempts at German and Esperanto are included.
- Compact size. The program and its data total about 350 kbytes.
- Written in C++.
I regularly use it to listen to blogs and news sites. I prefer the sound through a domestic stereo system rather than my small computer speakers.
INSTALLATION:
- Place the "speak" executable file in the command path, eg in /usr/local/bin
- Place the "speak-data" directory in /usr/share as /usr/share/speak-data.
Alternatively if it is placed in the users home directory (i.e. /home/ /speak-data) then that will be used instead.
- Dependencies.
speak uses the PortAudio sound library, so you will need to have the libportaudio0 library package installed. It may be already, since its used by other software, such as OpenOffice.org and the Audacity sound editor.
COMMAND OPTIONS:
Examples
To use at the command line, type:
speak -f < text file >
Or just type
speak
followed by text on subsequent lines. Each line is spoken when RETURN is pressed. Use speak -p to see the corresponding phonemes codes.
echo "This is a test" | speak
Speaking from a single line command.
Enhancements:
- Roman number translation added for some languages.
- Improvements to languages, including en-r, Hungarian, Romanian.
- Various bug fixes.

MWSpeaker project is the worst speech synthesis software ever.

You provide a phrase, and MWSpeaker looks up each word in Merriam-Websters online dictionary, downloads the corresponding pronounciations, and plays them in sequence.

M-W Speaker takes a phrase (no punctuation please), takes each work, looks it up on the Meriam Webster website, downloads the sound file, and then, once it has sound files for each word in the phrase, plays them all back to back.

The result is something that resembles the sentence with any proper names and words not considered proper english words removed. This process is pretty slow since each word has to be looked up and the sound file downloaded by hey :)

This is mostly just for fun. I see no practical use for this whatsoever.

Its written in Python.

Tao Linux (pronounced dow Linux) is a project to build a free Linux distribution from the sources used in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product line.
The target market is either experienced system administrators who would like freely available binaries of this code, or end users who are interested in experimenting with enterprise functionality.
Besides being mostly compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, it also includes software packages such as Eclipse and clustering tools not found in the base RHEL products.
Main features:
- Includes gcj-compiled Eclipse IDE
- Includes clustering tools
- Yum with protectbase patch for safer use of 3rd-party repos
- Supports ACLs in ext3, nfs and Samba
- Many packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux also run on Tao Linux
- Free as in speech and beer
- Security updates (in SRPM form, at least) available into 2008