tellme runs the command and notify the user through text-to-speech when the process finishes.

For example:

tellme sudo yum update

will eventually say "finished yum update successfully". Yes, it's smart enough to strip the sudo out. Some configuration options are available, see the example configuration file. With that file,

cd myproject
tellme make install

will eventually say "finished myproject make install successfully".

autoreconf -ivf
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

festival is currently hardcoded as the text-to-speech engine.