This incredibly useful to get alerted to some long-running job finishing or the like, e.g.

  ./some-lengthy-job | say Done

Back when I did lots of Apache Spark on a underpowered cluster, I had a script to lower Spotify volume, tell me the outcome (success, failure), then set Spotify back to original volume.

I still use this as a kitchen timer all the time when cooking while on my Macbook with utimer, which is basically a count-down timer for the shell (available via brew install utimer), e.g.

  utimer -c 10m | say Pasta is done