Espeak

espeak (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/) multi-lingual speech synthesis is available in Alpine Linux 1.7.29 and above. So this just begs the question... what cool things can you do with a router that talks?

But the first thing to do is just to get the router to talk.

Requirements

the soundcard and oss modules must be loaded.
use umix to set the volume on the sound card
sox is required to play the voice (for some reason alpine espeak doesn't talk to /dev/dsp)

Example

For historical reasons, the canonical reference for speech synthesis on Alpine Linux is the phrase "Liver. Yes you heard me. Liver. There's nothing I can do about it."

To get your router to say, that, send the output of espeak to stdout, and pipe the result to sox's play command:

  espeak --stdout "Liver. Yes you heard me.  Liver.  There's nothing I can do about it." | play  -t wav -

enjoy.