[ale] text to speech on Linux?

[jay]

A friend of mine is finally making the move to Linux (yay) and one of the 
things that he uses daily on Windows is the text to speech engine to give him 
audio alerts for things. He's looking for a similar functionality on Linux. 

Is there anything out there that will take command line input and just say it 
aloud?  I found festival, and this appears to be the only viable option for 
text to speech on Linux...and it doesnt take a straight command line 
argument, you have to put the text into a file first, or do it interactively 
from stdin.  This can of course be scripted up very easily, I know, but in 
any case, does anyone know of any other text to speech tools for Linux (1000 
dollar IBM solutions dont count, it's gotta be  free)? 

-Jay