mespeak

espeak is, in the developers’ words, “a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.”

I cannot comment on the Windows version, but the Linux version has a command-line interface with a lot of options.  So I wrote three wrappers, called, respectively, mespeak, mespeakf, and mespeaku.

mespeak, to be used as mespeak "some text":

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp "$1" --stdout | aplay

mespeakf, to be used as mespeak file:

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp -f $1 --stdout | aplay

mespeaku, to read a webpage as mespeak http://www.website.com:

lynx --dump $1 | sed 's/\[[^\]*]//g'| mespeak --stdin

So sorry about the sed script.  It becomes rather write-only when one is matching against literal brackets.