When I was on MacOS, I really enjoyed the command say to make my macOS speak (another bad reason to procrastinate) and I was looking for a similar tool on Linux to make my Lenovo speak 😄. After a quick search, I found two software: spd-say and espeak. They both offer the same basic options, similar to the ones say provides on MacOS.

spd-say

spd-say was already included in the set of tools I install with Debian so I checked out the documentation with man spd-say:

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NAME
       spd-say - send text-to-speech output request to speech-dispatcher

SYNOPSIS
       spd-say [options] "some text"

DESCRIPTION
       spd-say  sends  text-to-speech  output  request to speech-dispatcher process which
       handles it and ideally outputs the result to the audio system.

[...]

On my current set up, the default language was English:

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$ spd-say "hello, my name is Bob"

In order to check out the complete list of languages, one must use option -L:

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$ spd-say -L

then option -l to select the language:

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$ spd-say -l es -t female2 -r -20 "Yo soy Miguel"

In the command above, I used option -t to select a specific type of voice and r to set the rate of speech, it takes a value between -100 (very slow) and +100 (very quick).

espeak

espeak required to be installed, so on my Debian machine I first entered:

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$ sudo apt-get install espeak

Again, I first skimmed he documentation, i.e. man espeak:

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NAME
       espeak - A multi-lingual software speech synthesizer.

SYNOPSIS
       espeak [options] [<words>]

DESCRIPTION
       espeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and some other languages.

[...]

So, in order to display the list of voices available I had to type:

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$ espeak --voices

And then I used -v to select the language, -s to set the speed of speech (expressed as a number of words per minutes) and -p adjust the pitch (0 being very flat, 99 very sharp):

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$ espeak -v pt-br -p 20 -s 200 "Eu sou brasileiro"