eSpeak is a compact, open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages. It uses a formant synthesis method, providing many languages in a small size.
This software produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source text to speech (TTS) engines, and sounds quite different. It is perhaps not as natural or “smooth”, but some 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.
Projects using eSpeak include NVDA, Ubuntu and OLPC, and it has also been used by Google Translate.
eSpeak is derived from the “Speak” speech synthesizer for British English for Acorn RISC OS computers which was originally written in 1995 by Jonathan Duddington.
Features include:
- Two methods of synthesis: the original eSpeak synthesizer and a Klatt synthesizer each using different types of formant synthesis.
- Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
- Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
- Supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) (not complete), and also HTML.
- Compact size. The program and its data, including many languages, totals about 1.4 Mbytes.
- Can be used as a front-end to MBROLA diphone voices, eSpeak converts text to phonemes with pitch and length information.
- Can translate text into 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 welcome.
- Development tools are available for producing and tuning phoneme data
- Supports languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Cantonese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Kannada, Kurdish, Latvian, Lojban, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
Website: espeak.sourceforge.net
Support:
Developer: Jonathan Duddington
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
eSpeak is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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