Well, after I finally got Festival installed and working, I am trying to build Gnopernicus so I can hopefully find out what it can really do. Well, trying to compile the gnome-speech library got me nowhere. The last line of the autogen.sh script says USE_GNOME2_MACROS=1 . gnome-autogen.sh which bombs because there is no file called gnome-autogen.sh. Where is that file? Also, how can I make Festival sound less robotic? It sounds like a bored Chemistry professor right now. I think I could use it to go to sleep at night with its flat and slow speech.