On the latest release of Linux Mint, I did the following (it should also work for Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian-like systems): sudo apt-get install espeak

On the latest release of Linux Mint, I did the following (it should also work for Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian-like systems): sudo apt-get install espeak HOST=127.0.0.1 ping $HOST | sed -u -e 's/.*/ping/' | espeak -v en The -u (unbuffered) option to sed was required to get it to work. Apparently, the problem is that Mint's version of sed (GNU sed version 4.2.1) will buffer too aggressively for this usage when the output is not a terminal. It was a little confusing to troubleshoot since the output looked OK without the last pipe, the espeak command seemed to work when you just run it and type stuff in directly, but putting them together yielded silence without the -u switch.