>A Triton, or any other sampler, can talk its fool head off right
out of the box.
The Waldorf Microwave 1 has a speech synthesizer that,
unfortunately, wasn't included on my Microwave II.
There was an old Commodore64 program called S.A.M. that did a pretty
good job of speech synthesis. (You just typed in phrases/sentences
and it would speak them.)