16.04 LTS How to make the system announce the time at the top of the hour with eSpeak

Past versions of Ubuntu had speech built in.

Searching in Unity I can't find anything with the words "speak" nor "speech" that are relevant for TTS

My plan is to have cron jobs speak so I can leave the monitor shut off.

Beginning with having it do a time announcement each hour. It is OK if it is not perfectly precise to the second.

So how can I make 16.04 LTS speak?

Solution 1:

For my project, cron jobs that can talk, espeak is the simplest.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install espeak

It can announce the time with /home/me/scripts/saytime:

#!/bin/bash
echo "\`$(date +%H)\` Hundred" | espeak

Then set it into crontab like so:

export EDITOR=gedit
crontab -e

...add this line:

00 * * * * /home/me/scripts/saytime

For more details about espeak itself:

How to text-to-speech output using command-line?