| # eSpeak text to speech Download Forum
Usage Voices Documents | eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and several other languages. eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods. It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin. A library version is also available. It works well as a "Talker" with the KDE text to speech system (KTTS), as an alternative to Festival for example. As such, it can speak text which has been selected into the clipboard, or directly from the Konquerer browser or the Kate editor. Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered. Can produce speech output as a WAV file. SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not complete), and also HTML. Compact size. The program and its data, including several languages, totals about 420 kbytes. Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine. Potential for other languages. Several are included in varying stages of progress. Help from native speakers for these or other languages is welcomed. Development tools available for producing and tuning phoneme data. Written in C++. I regularly use it to listen to blogs and news sites. I prefer the sound through a domestic stereo system rather than my small computer speakers. speak was originally written for the Acorn/RISC_OS computers starting in 1995. This version is an update and re-write, including a relaxation of the original memory and processing power constraints, and some provision to add additional languages if anyone is interested in doing so. The project name speak had already been taken by another project on SourceForge (for a Windows TTS front-end) so I added a letter 'e' to the front to make eSpeak. For now, the program executable remains speak and is referred to as such in the documentation.