I’ve been doing some experiments with the C++ API of the festival text to speech library. The documentation describes gives a code snippet to use this API. So far I’ve successfully manged to compile a C++ snippet like the one below

#include<stdio.h>
#include<festival.h>
int main(int argc,char **argv)
{
int heap_size=210000;
int load_init_files=1;
festival_initialize(load_init_files,heap_size);
festival_say_text("it is lunch time");
festival_wait_for_spooler();
return 0;
}

I compiled it with the following line which is highly specific to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

sudo g++ main.cc -l Festival -I/usr/include/festival  -I/usr/lib/speech_tools/include -leststring -lestools -lestbase -o nat.out