does anyone know about espeak.

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi Mike,
Well, eSpeak is a smallish open-source speech synth. It is formant based 
unlike Festival, meaning that it builds up the sound out of sine waves 
mostly, as opposed to concatenating and interpolating samples of real human 
speech. You suffer a big hit in naturalness but in return formant voices 
scale much better, in terms of intelligibility and are much easier to edit. 
In my experience, formant synths seem to have a smaller memory footprint, 
too, and are sometimes more responsive or less CPU intensive depending on 
how complex synthesis is being done. Dolphin's Orpheus and Eti Eloquence in 
Windows are both formant synths where as the MS, L&H or AT&T synths are not, 
for example. In Linux, I think eSpeak might be the only software based 
formant solution.

eSpeak is already multi-lingual and I'm working with the author to introduce 
rudimentary Finnish support to the synth over time, for example.

The author is Jonathan Duddington <jsd at clara.co.uk> who is also posting on 
this list and did so just recently. eSPeak is available as a Ubuntu and 
Debian compatible binary release at Source Forge:

http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

eSpeak works, with tweaking, with all the apps supporting speech dispatcher 
such as Gnopernicus, Orca and Emacs Speak I think. It can also be driven on 
the command-line.

I'm going to add eSpeak on my list of speech synth reviews once I become 
familiar enough with the program.

PS: Hope top-posting as is typical of groups with VI-people, is OK here too. 
I seem to have done just that out of habit, If not, I can easily switch to 
heavily snipped in-the-middle posting.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/


mike coulombe wrote:
> Hi I was told there is a program called e-speak.
> Does anyone know anything about it and what it will work with.