Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[muggins]

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:

[muggins]

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:

[Lobster]

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

[muggins]

Thanks Lobster,

I shall investigate further.

cheers

[Taavi]

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.

[muggins]

Updated to v1.36.02

[MU]

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

[MU]

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

[HairyWill]

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!

[muggins]

Uploaded v1.37.

[muggins]

Uploaded v1.38.

[muggins]

Uploaded v1.39.

[muggins]

Uploaded v1.40.

[Aitch]

[Aitch]

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