What is espeak-ng?
The eSpeak NG is a compact open-source software text-to-speech synthesizer for Linux, Windows, Android, and other operating systems. It supports more than 100 languages and accents. It is based on the eSpeak engine created by Jonathan Duddington.
eSpeak NG uses a “formant synthesis” method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.
eSpeak NG is available as:
- A command-line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
- A shared library version for use by other programs. (On Windows this is a DLL).
- eSpeak NG has been ported to other platforms, including Solaris and Mac OSX.
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 many languages, totals about a few Mbytes.
- Can translate text into small 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 of these or other languages is welcome.
- Written in C.
Synopsis: espeak-ng [options] [words]
Eg:
espeak-ng "This is a test"
Speak the sentence "This is a test" using the default English voice.
Options:
- -h, --help show Summary of options.
- --version Prints the espeak library version and the location of the espeak voice data.
3. -f : It will text file to speak.
4.--stdin: It will read text input from stdin till to the end of a stream at once.
If neither -f nor — stdin is provided, then from parameter are spoken, or text is spoken from stdin, read separately one line by line at a time.
5. -d
Use the specified device to speak the audio on. If not specified, the default audio device is used.
6. -v <voice name>
Use voice file of this name from espeak-ng-data/voices. A variant can be specified using voice+variant, such as af+m3.
7. -w <wave file name>
Write output to this WAV file, rather than speaking it directly.
8.--split=
Used with -w to split the audio output into recorded chunks.
9.--voices[=<language code>]
Lists the available voices. If = is present then only those voices which are suitable for that language are listed.
10.--voices=
Lists the voices in the specified subdirectory.
EXAMPLES
- espeak-ng “This is a test”
With the help of this command, speaker speak the sentence “This is a test” using the default English voice. - espeak-ng -f FileName.txt
Speak the contents of hello.txt using the default English voice. - espeak-ng --voices List all voices supported by eSpeak.
- espeak-ng — voices=en
List all voices that speak English (en). - espeak-ng — voices=mb List all voices using the MBROLA voice synthesizer.
Thank-you!
Did you find this blog post helpful? Share it with your friends!