Text-to-Speech Software for Linux: If you've been using Mac OS X or Windows Vista before, you may be a bit disappointed to learn that there's no speech synthesizer or text-to-speech (TTS) application that is installed by default on your Linux distribution. For those of you who don't know what a speech synthesizer is, it's simply a computer program that converts normal language text into speech.

Gespeaker 'Text to Speech' utility is a GTK+ frontend for Espeak , that allows you to listen to text in many different languages. The utility also allows you to listen received messages from Empathy and others instant messengers.

Akregator is a KDE application for reading online news feeds... [and] ...Festival is a general multi-lingual speech syntheses system and it offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques.

"Wouldn't it be nice to just start an application at the navigation stage? Well you can. As well as: graphically feed text to Espeak or Festival, graphically display a command's output like a directory listing or a file's contents, graphically start a web browser at a specific website like a Google search with your input, and so much more! This is basic BASH and Zenity, so don't worry, it's easy!"

n this tutorial we will show you how to get Pidgin to speak instant messages in Ubuntu using Festival. For Festival, if you diden`t heard about before, it is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system that offers a full text to speech system
with various APIs

An open-source speech recognition platform called ‘Simon’ has been developed under the General Public License (GPL), in order to serve people with locomotor and cognitive dysfunctions with an advanced speech recognition system (SRC).

Have you been frustrated with speech recognition software in the past? I've used the top proprietary products, such as IBM's ViaVoice and Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking in the past. I've found limited good uses for them, but they're not entirely accurate, and they're reasonably expensive.

"The University of Pavia, in Italy, recently awarded Richard Stallman with an honorary degree. Stallman gave a short speech, his "lectio doctoralis", on the ethical imperative to use free software, focussing on individuals and schools. The speech has been transcribed by Alessandro Rubini, with checking by Dora Scillipoti and Luca Andreucci.

CMU Sphinx is one of the most popular speech recognition applications for Linux and it can correctly capture words. it also gives the developers the ability to build speech systems, interact with voice and build something unique and useful.