This looks like a very old version of the manual (I'm off to install it and take a look at a newer one) but festival does appear to have voices: http://www.cstr

This looks like a very old version of the manual (I'm off to install it and take a look at a newer one) but festival does appear to have voices: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/festival_24.html#SEC97 http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/festival_2... edit That appears to be the newest version of the docs. You can select voices by calling the function (voice_voicename) in interactive mode. So something like this works: echo -e "(voice_nitech_us_rms_arctic_hts)\n(SayText \"this is a sentence\")" | festival On Fedora, I had to install the festvox- packages to get other voices.