If you've got Growl installed (and if you've had your mac longer than a day - you probably do), then you can use growlnotify to dump messages on your screen.

I use it in long running scripts (like deploys).

    growlnotify -t "Deploy" -m "Complete"

Shell script version

  #!/bin/bash
  VOICES=("agnes" "kathy" "princess" "vicki" "victoria" "bruce" "fred" "junior" "ralph" "albert" "bad" "bahh" "bells" "boing" "bubbles" "cellos" "deranged" "good" "hysterical" "pipe" "trinoids" "whisper")
  MSGS=("deploy is now complete" "deploy complete" "deploy completed" "sir the deployment has finished" "hey the deploy is done" "look at this cool deploy" "deployment completeed")
  VOICE=$RANDOM%${#VOICES[@]}
  MSG=$RANDOM%${#MSGS[@]}
  say -v ${VOICES[VOICE]} ${MSGS[MSG]}

You can always add

  && say Done

to the end of long-running commands and it just works.

I use something like this for notifying about broken builds in our continuous integration environment, but on linux with "festival". I don't know if this utility has voices or not, but it works pretty well:

echo Joe Strummer broke the build | festival --tts

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_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.

On my systems I do: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Festival#can.27t_open_.2... since Alsa in general works better (no flock) than OSS.

This idea is both cute and useful. I frequently run a deployment script and switch to another window (e.g. HN) only to forget about the deployment. I will definitely be using this.

Any linux equivalent?

You can use espeak for voice.

> espeak "Hello World"

flite is also good (simple). I used it to find the sound card model that would properly work with my laptop: http://aeminium.org/slug/software/shell/#test-hda-intel-mode...