The problem with flite is that it sounds pretty awlful

Well I'm not sure if you've used v1.1 yet, but it comes with a 16 KHz voice that isn't all that bad. It's not perfect, in fact, it's definitely stripped down from Festival, and it's not going to compete with something like AT&T's Natural Voices or anything, but *it works* and it works right now, and it's getting better.

I wrote the author a while back and he does have a commercial version of flite available via his website http://www.cepstral.com/. But for me, flite does an admirable job considering it's running on the Empeg in real time.

I'm attaching a sample mp3 file for people to make their own judgements. No, it doesn't sound like a real person talking, and yes, the commercial systems are advanced, but I'm not imagining anyone getting them working on the Empeg anytime soon. I perosnally think the TTS provided by flite would be perfectly acceptable for voice prompts reading you the artist/title, playing GPS directions, etc. But that's just my opinion.