[conspire] text to speech (was Re: Link to Online Computer Software Training and other things.)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Collins (paul at burly.ondioline.org):

> "K Sandoval" <indigo.kai at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I am also interested in a text to speech app.  I found orca and
> > will do some research.
> > Does any here have any experience with text to speech apps for Ubuntu
> > or Linux in general?
> 
> I played with espeak recently and found it quite good.
> 
>         http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, Paul.  By the way, very likely, I misremembered what Kai was
interested in -- and you got it right.  My posts about speech
_recognition_ on Linux, with some luck, will be of interest to some folks
anyway.  

Speech _synthesis_ or (text to speech) is the other half of the problem,
and a far easier one.


Options:

o  Festival.  Centre for Speech Technology Research, U. of Edinburgh.  
   Supports text to speech at the command prompt, in emacs, at the 
   level of a C++ lib, and so on.
   http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

o  eSpeak.  Newer than Festival, I gather.  Integrates nicely with KTTS 
   (which see below) and GNOME.  Fairly compact.
   http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

o  Flite (Festival Lite), developed at CMU to be faster/lighter than
   Festival.
   http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

o  MBROLA 
   Includes non-English voice data (which you can also use with Festival).
   http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html
   Note also compatible HADIFIX German-language data (proprietary terms):
   http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/dt/forsch/phonetik/hadifix/HADIFIXforMBROLA.html

o  KDE Text-to-Speech System (KTSS), speech-enables KDE apps via DCOP
   http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/

o  FreeTTS (Java), based on CMU's Flite
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetts/

o  Fonix Corp. FAAST (Fonix Accelerated Application Solutions
   Technology)  (proprietary)
   http://www.fonix.com/

o  Cepstral Voices (proprietary).
   http://cepstral.com/downloads/

o  NCH Swift Sound Software's Verbose Text to Speech Reader
   (proprietary).  Requires gtk2.
   http://www.nch.com.au/verbose/