Need text to speech and speech recognition tools for Linux

Question

I\'m planning on writing a program for Linux that uses text to speech and speech recognition. What are the best tools/libraries for this? Should I use Windows instead to be

Answer 1

I have used both Loquendo and Festival under linux. I would consider the festival voices I have used pretty poor, with very robotic synthesis. The Loquendo voices, on the other hand, are excellent - very high quality.