This is a small Bash script that downloads your friends statuses and reads them aloud using the Festival speech synth. You need to download some packages first. On Ubuntu do:

sudo apt-get install curl xmlstarlet festival


After installing the command is:

curl -s -u twitterusername:twitterpassword 'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=5' | xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//status' -v 'user/screen_name' -o ': ' -v 'text' -n | festival --tts


You should hear a computerized voice reading your friends latest updates.

If you find this useful, it can be interesting to save the script and put it in the Linux crontab file to automatically do it every so often. Just run crontab -e and include the following:

* * * * * /home/robojamie/twittertalk.sh


That updates every minute, so you may want to adjust it. Just take look at the cron tab syntax.