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.
Key Features
- 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.
Related Software
| Speech Tools | |
|---|---|
| Piper | Fast, local neural text to speech system |
| Bark | Transformer-based text-to-audio model. |
| sherpa-onnx | Speech-to-text and text-to-speech software |
| Coqui TTS | Offers pretrained models in more than 1,100 different languages |
| Dia | 1.6B parameter text to speech model |
| Tortoise | Multi-voice text-to-speech system trained with an emphasis on quality |
| Festival | General multi-lingual speech synthesis system |
| PraatSpeechAnalyser | Software for speech analysis and synthesis |
| Chatterbox | Family of text-to-speech models |
| Speech Note | Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation |
| Mimic 3 | Lightweight Text to Speech engine |
| OrcaScreenReader | Scriptable screen reader |
| MeloTTS | High-quality multi-lingual text-to-speech library |
| Parler-TTS | Lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) model |
| Flite | Small, fast run time text to speech synthesis engine |
| RHVoice | Gives the visually impaired a synthesis voice with their screen reader |
| eSpeak NG | Continuation of the eSpeak project |
| eSpeak | Speech synthesizer using a formant synthesis method |
| Orpheus-TTS-FastAPI | High-performance self-hosted text-to-speech server |
| Gespeaker | GTK-based frontend for eSpeak |
| VoiceGen | Simple text-to-speech application |
| Glate | Google Translator and Text To Speech Service |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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