Nerd Vittles has an excellent post on a new text-to-speech add-on for Asterisk called Flite that can read text in a MySQL database to a caller. While there already existed the Festival TTS, there were reports of performance problems when Asterisk 1.2 and Asterisk@Home 2.x were released often resulting in 5-7 second delays between when you hear the TTS engine say something. Not good if you don't want your callers hanging up.

The solution comes from Nerd Vittles:

And today our tip of the hat goes to Francois Aucamp from South Africa who has single-handedly reengineered Carnegie Mellon University's open source speech synthesis engine (Flite) to work with Asterisk@Home and restored voice synthesis to its rightful place as an indispensable component in the Asterisk@Home bundle. We'll show you how to install the necessary components in less than 15 minutes, and your Asterisk system will once again be speaking to callers whenever you need it to.