eSpeak

Introduction

eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and potentially other languages.

Details

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.

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.
* Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
* Potential for other languages. Rudimentary (and probably humourous) attempts at German and Esperanto are included.
* Compact size. The program and its data total about 350 kbytes.
* Written in C++.

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 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.

RISC OS Compatibility

RISC OS 2 RISC OS 3.1x RISC OS 3.5 RISC OS 3.6 RISC OS 3.7x RISC OS 4.0x Select 1i9 (4.29) Select 2i3 (4.33) Select 3i3 (4.37) Select 3i4/Adjust 1i2 (4.39) RISC OS 4.40 RISC OS 5.0x RISC OS 5.1x         Help on versions

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