Have your IMs spoke to you with good voices

When using Pidgin, and you receive an IM, you will hear it spoken to you, even if Pidgin is buried under many windows or on another workspace. Following these instructions will get you the good sounding voices, the pidgin plugin, the files necessary to use mbrola English voices with festival since the Pidgin plugin uses Festival. The last command just creates a .festivalrc file in your home directory that will fix issues with errors about /dev/dsp and not hearing the text being spoken. I've just done this today after much research, so I've saved you the time. I've been playing with and using Text to Speech for a long time, and I've been in the process of creating my own software. I could use some donations!!! Yes, I do have a working product, but I am expanding it big time and have great plans for it. Enjoy this. Be sure to go to your list of plugins in Pidgin when done and enable pidgin-festival, and choose between the voices that you have installed. us1 is a female voice btw. It will look like this when you go to configure plugin.

# Install the plugin
sudo apt-get install pidgin-festival 
# Install mbrola with all English voices available for it
# Yes, there is a question mark there. This bash globbing, matches mbrola-us1, mbrola-us2 and mbrola-us3
sudo apt-get install mbrola mbrola-en1 mbrola-us?
sudo apt-get install festvox-us? festvox-en1 # Again, use the question mark in the command
# Optional step
printf “;use ALSA\n(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Method ‘Audio_Command)\n(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Command \”aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r \$SR \$FILE\”)\n” | tee -a .festivalrc

When you are done, go lift 300 lbs like I did!!!