eSpeak
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, Welsh
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Last Updated Monday, March 25 2013 @ 04:13 PM EST
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