I use rPi to listen to text-files: lying down, when it's too stressfull to read them. The TextToSpeech is done on a PC by 'festival'. The latest [2010] festival is a research project of university, and I failed to compile it; so I just installed an older binary. OTOH, espeak d/l-ed & installed immediately on the rPi.
TTS is a non-trivial task; and the festival's dir-tree gives an idea of what's involved. Someone wrote "I prefer espeak"; which I took to mean that he'd compared the quality of espeak against festival. But my intial tests of espeak, show that festival is far superior. OTOH some wiki seems to rate espeak above festival.
Did he mean "I prefer to do the simple installation"?
Festival's reading of the newspaper, is fully understandable. Can espeak do that?