Well... Here's the deal. There are basically two options for TTS on Linux. Rsynth and Festival. Rsynth is much lower quality and doesn't do as good of a job figuring out sentence structure or the proper sound for a given letter. Festival is what is used in the demo MP3. Festival unfortunately has a memory footprint of 10 megabytes. Even if we had the RAM I don't think we'd have the power to do real time text-to-speech. I did cross-compile Festival and the binary runs, butt immediately crashes on my Empeg.

Rsynth would be an option except that I can't get it to compile and run properly on my Empeg. I need to hack it up to write exactly 4608 bytes and I haven't had any luck with it. Anyone smarter than me who wants to give it a try is more than welcome to do so. If someone can get rsynth working then we have at least rudimentary TTS.

If it used Rsynth then I'd have to do a lot more manual fiddling with the questions (replacing some E's with the "schwa" phoneme, for instance) because rsynth isn't as intelligent about choosing the proper sound. Me parsing through 20,000 questions is not likely.

The authors of Festival have decreasing the memory footprint listed as one of their goals, but I'm not holding my breath.