On a sunny day (Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:04:18 -0400) it happened Dennis Lee Bieber
 wrote in :

>On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 20:12:48 +0000, druck  declaimed the
>following:
>
>
>>Speech synthesis, as opposed to speech recognition, is not very
>>processor intensive. The synthetic ones require the most computation,
>>and the natural voice ones are more dependent on memory bandwidth and
>>storage latency.
>>
>>We were able to run many synths on 200MHz iPaq StrongARM PDAs and had
>>all the big name synthetic and natural voice synthesisers running on
>>easily on early 400MHz XScale Windows CE mobile phones. Even a Pi1
>>wouldn't have problems running those, and I suspect should also be able
>>to cope with the latest versions.
>>
>
>        The 8MHz Commodore Amiga used to have translator (converted normal
text
>to encoded phonemes [numeric intonation data and conversion of "c" to "s"
>or "k" as appropriate) and narrator device. However, I think they lost the
>distribution license for the libraries by the time of AmigaOS 3. The
>synthesizer device had the ability to return height and width data to a
>running program, intended, I'm sure, to allow the program to animate a
>mouth to match the syllables.

I am running a Pi1B (I think it is, very old, 2 x USB out) and the 'festival'
speech synthesizer:

https://learn.adafruit.com/speech-synthesis-on-the-raspberry-pi/installing-the-
festival-speech-package
to speak alarm messages for a navigation system.
The pi also does a whole lot of other stuff at the same time:
 http://panteltje.com/panteltje/xgpspc/index.html

Have not got a pi 3 yet, maybe waiting for the 3.141593 as it will be more
accurate.

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