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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Mon 31 Dec 2007, 23:18 Post subject:
espeak: A speech synthesizer |
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http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
Uploaded to espeak-1.47.07.pet (1.09Mbytes)
Depending on whether the pupversion you're using comes with libportaudio, you may also need the attached pet below.
This is a commandline program. Enter espeak -h to see usage. To hear a text file read to you, (in a staccato voice!), enter espeak -f textname.txt
To output as a .wav file do:
Code: | espeak -f abcd.txt -w abcd.wav |
Description |
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Download |
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portaudio-v19-i486.pet |
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59.96 KB |
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2563 Time(s) |
Last edited by muggins on Sat 20 Apr 2013, 07:39; edited 12 times in total
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Tue 01 Jan 2008, 02:26 Post subject:
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Being monolingual, I'd be interested to hear, from non-anglo puppets, in how some of the non-english voices sound.
ls /usr/share/espeak-data/voices generates these files:
Code: |
af cs de el eo fi grc hr is la mk no pt ro sk sv ta vi zhy
bs cy default en es fr hi hu it mb nl pl pt-pt ru sr sw !v zh
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I know that to my ears, the scottish accent in ./en/en-sc, doesn't sound particularly scottish to me.
You can use a different accent, say russian, by:
Code: | espeak -v ru -f filename.txt |
One deficiency seems to be that most of the voices seem to be male.
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Lobster
Official Crustacean

Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 15238 Location: Paradox Realm
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Posted: Tue 01 Jan 2008, 05:36 Post subject:
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there are some female voices that can be added here:
http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html
here is how to use them
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/mbrola.html
_________________ YinYana AI Buddhism
Last edited by Lobster on Sun 24 Aug 2008, 00:37; edited 1 time in total
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Tue 01 Jan 2008, 05:48 Post subject:
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Thanks Lobster,
I shall investigate further.
cheers
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Taavi
Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 146 Location: Suomi, Finland
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Posted: Wed 02 Jan 2008, 09:35 Post subject:
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It's speaks finnish quite well. Just a quick test - I guess it could be better with some trimming. This is nice surprise - my language is not world wide spoken and as it's a small language it's not usual that these programs can do it. In fact among the free programs there are very little finnish speaking ones.
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Thu 13 Mar 2008, 04:43 Post subject:
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Updated to v1.36.02
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MU

Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 13648 Location: Karlsruhe, Germany
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Posted: Tue 18 Mar 2008, 23:15 Post subject:
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It has an accent of course, so you need to rewrite texts for foreign languages.
This is not understandable (correct german):
espeak "willkommen bei Puppylinux"
But this is ok ("wrong" german):
espeak "villkomen bai Puppylinux"
Nifty, impressioning for this small size.
oh, stupid me... learn to read...
espeak -v de "willkommen bei Puppylinux"
But the "manually tweaked" sounds more natural, so it will be woth the effort to modify text for certain purposes like menusystems.
Mark
_________________ my recommended links
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MU

Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 13648 Location: Karlsruhe, Germany
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Posted: Wed 19 Mar 2008, 02:36 Post subject:
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Here is a dotpup for German speaking people:
http://dotpups.de/dotpups/Desktop-Tools/LeseTextVor.pup
mirror:
http://www.puppyfiles.ca/dotpupsde/dotpups/Desktop-Tools/LeseTextVor.pup
It is 12 MB (14 MB extracted).
Espeak and portaudio are included.
Includes the female german voice "de5".
You can drag textfiles on the script "lesetextvor" or use the "öffnen mit" option of your filemanager, if it supports the Freedesktop.org MIME-Types (PCManFM, Konqueror).
To test it, you also can type in a console:
lesetextvor "hallo welt"
Mark
_________________ my recommended links
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HairyWill

Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2946 Location: Southampton, UK
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Posted: Wed 19 Mar 2008, 06:06 Post subject:
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cool
I did think about including mbrola and a nicer voice in jwmspeak, I misread the licence and thought that it was not free to distribute ( wrong again, read more carefully Will ).
It sounds quite staccato but I don't listen to much german. The en1 english mbrola voice was much nicer than the espeak default, definitely worth the effort if you are going to listen to it a lot.
I also tried using a couple of the french female voices to read english. I thought that my ear might be more forgiving of mispronunciation in a foreign accent. Not successful it sounds almost unintelligible. I think there are some voices specifically built to do foreign accents. I want my menus read in english by a husky french woman!
_________________ Will
contribute: community website, screenshots, puplets, wiki, rss
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Wed 16 Jul 2008, 00:16 Post subject:
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Uploaded v1.37.
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Sun 24 Aug 2008, 00:35 Post subject:
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Uploaded v1.38.
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Tue 02 Dec 2008, 08:08 Post subject:
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Uploaded v1.39.
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muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6747 Location: hobart
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Posted: Sat 27 Dec 2008, 07:52 Post subject:
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Uploaded v1.40.
Quote: |
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· New languages have been added: Latvian, Catalan, Albanian, and Armenian.
· Adjustments have been made to improve the tonal quality of speech.
· Languages have been improved, including US English and Esperanto.
· Text within < script > and < style > tag pairs is now ignored when speaking HTML.
· The command options --path and --phonout have been added.
· Many minor improvements and bugfixes have been made. |
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Aitch

Joined: 04 Apr 2007 Posts: 6815 Location: Chatham, Kent, UK
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Posted: Sat 27 Dec 2008, 10:01 Post subject:
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HairyWill wrote: | I want my menus read in english by a husky french woman! |
Me too - In person
Aitch
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Aitch

Joined: 04 Apr 2007 Posts: 6815 Location: Chatham, Kent, UK
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Posted: Sat 27 Dec 2008, 16:28 Post subject:
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muggins, can you have a look at speakup incorporation?
ftp://mirrors.blueyonder.co.uk/sites/ftp.slackware.com/slackware-12.2/SPEAKUP_DOCS.TXT
Good job, mate - getting closer to internationalisation, I hope....
Aitch
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