Ubuntu includes Festival (festival package and perhaps other fest...) and Espeak (espeak package). For GUI integration, look at Orca (gnome-orca package).
Voices for languages other than English can be hard to come by. Espeak comes with English only, and Festival comes with voices in Czech, English, Finnish, Hindi, Italian, Marathi and Telugu. Both Espeak and Festival can be made to work with voices from the Mbrola project, which are free as in beer but not as in speech.
In the spirit of teaching a man to fish, I'll mention a little-known feature of the Debian/Ubuntu package system. Unfortunately, it's not available in Ubuntu's default package manager (synaptics), but it is available in the text mode package manager aptitude. Install the debtags package, then in aptitude select “Views | New Debtags browser”. This shows available packages by tags; the sound::speech tag (i.e. expand the sound catagory then its speech category) lists speech synthesis software.
The same solution should work in Windows, but you need something equivalent to espeak.
Here is a PowerShell snippet that, using .NET classes, reads some text:
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech
$speak = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$speak.Speak('Hello.')
Here is the equivalent command that can be run in Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe):
PowerShell -Command "Add-Type –AssemblyName System.Speech; (New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer).Speak('hello');"
Using the above command (and replacing 'hello' with '%GDWORD%'), and steps mentioned in post above, we can achieve the same thing.
Here are the full steps:
Open GoldenDict and press F3 to bring up the Dictionaries window.
On the Sources tab, select Programs tab.
Click the Add button, select Audio for the Type column, enter some name ("tts" for example) in the Name column, and the following command for the Command Line column:
PowerShell -Command "Add-Type –AssemblyName System.Speech; (New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer).Speak('%GDWORD%');"
Don't forget to check the Enabled box.
Click OK
This uses the default voice in Windows. If you want to use a female voice, use the following command instead:
PowerShell -Command "Add-Type –AssemblyName System.Speech; $s=(New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer); $s.SelectVoiceByHints(2); $s.Speak('%GDWORD%');"
Configuring the voice is easy, if you are a .NET programmer and know PowerShell.
Best Answer
Yes, Microsoft did it again. Text-to-Speech has been removed from Word 2007.
Fortunately there is a rather easy way to implement it with a little bit of macro code.
The article Word text to speech describes how to add to Word two buttons using VBA macros, SpeakText and StopSpeaking.