eSpeak 1.27

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages.
eSpeak will surely produce good quality English speech.
eSpeak uses a different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds quite different.
eSpeak is perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods.
eSpeak can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin. A shared library version is also available.
eSpeak works well as a "Talker" with the KDE text to speech system (KTTS), as an alternative to Festival for example.
As such, eSpeak can speak text which has been selected into the clipboard, or directly from the Konquerer browser or the Kate editor. A Gnome Speech driver is now available.
Main features:
- 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 700 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++.