Mailing the story:
This week at LWN: The eSpeak Speech Synthesizer
Your author has been interested in computer speech synthesis since the late 1970s, when he interfaced a Votrax SC-01A speech synthesizer chip to his Imsai 8080 computer with some wire-wrap wire. News of the recently created eSpeak project naturally piqued his long-time interest in speech synthesis.
eSpeak is a compact phoneme-based speech synthesis system that is available under version 2 of the Gnu General Public license.