For anyone who is interested I've ported a text-to-speech engine to the Raspberry Pi. Google's Android project includes an offline TTS engine called Pico TTS that they licensed from a company called SVOX but open sourced under the Apache 2 license. It is a good quality, well documented product and is designed to run efficiently on embedded platforms like the Raspberry Pi and your smart phone.
I had to do a little hacking to exact it fully from Android and also write a simple demo application to show how it is used so it might be a little rough around the edges but it works and supports several different languages. It is also far nicer to listen to than eSpeak
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I made a rather poor quality video/presentation to demo it in action which you can see here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY8udTlrBXk
You can find the source code on GitHub here:
https://github.com/DougGore/picopi
It would be good for someone to try it out and let me know if it works for you. I'm sure many projects could benefit from it.
I've also left the code for the Java bindings in (untouched) just in case it could be incorporated into something like Scratch.
Doug