Talking computers were on fire 20 to 30 years ago. Movies like War Games and TV series like Knight Rider featured electronics speaking to their human operators. Speak-n-Spell machines taught a generation of children. Then the magic was out of the bottle and the focus drifted to other technologies.

Today, we have a new explosion of voice enabled devices. They announced this week the Amazon Echo will read Kindle books You will see more devices speaking with the growth of the Internet of Things. Special speech systhesis chips of old are no longer required. The smallest of today's Linux computers often has the capabity to output speech. This includes the Raspberry Pi line of single board computers.

From the Raspberry Pi Zero to the A+/B+ to the Raspberry Pi 2, all have the capacity to run free software to turn text to speech.

This tutorial will show you how to have your Pi use the free software packages Festival and its derivative Flite to output voice.