LINUX ESPEAK COMMANDS

espeak is a command line tool for Linux that converts text to speech. This is a compact speech synthesizer that provides support to English and many other languages. It is written in C.

eSpeak reads the text from the standard input or the input file. The voice generated, however, is nowhere close to a human voice. But it is still a compact and handy tool if you want to use it in your projects.

Some of the main features of eSpeak are:

• A command line tool for Linux and Windows
• Speaks text from a file or from stdin
• Shared library version for use by other programs
• SAPI5 version for Windows, so it can be used with screen-readers and other programs that support the Windows SAPI5 interface.
• Ported to other platforms, including Android, Mac OSX etc.
• Several voice characteristics to choose from
• speech output can be saved as .WAV.FILE
• SSML (SPEECH SYNTHESIS MARKUP LANGUAGE) is supported partially along with HTML
• Tiny in size, the complete program with language support etc is under 2 MB.
• Can translate text into phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
• Development tools available for producing and tuning phoneme data.

Languages:- The eSpeak speech synthesizer supports several languages, however in many cases these are initial drafts and need more work to improve them. Assistance from native speakers is welcome for these, or other new languages. Please contact me if you want to help.

eSpeak does text to speech synthesis for the following languages, some better than others.

Afrikaans, Albanian, Aragonese, Armenian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kannada, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Macedonian, Malaysian, Malayalam, Mandarin, Nepalese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh.

History:- Originally known as speak and originally written for Acorn/RISC_OS computers starting in 1995. This version is an enhancement and re-write, including a relaxation of the original memory and processing power constraints, and with support for additional languages.

COMMANDS:-

# espeak-ng “hello”

Or

# espeak-ng -v en “hello”

The variants are +m1 +m2 +m3 +m4 +m5 +m6 +m7 for male voices and +f1 +f2 +f3 +f4 which simulate female voices by using higher pitches. Other variants include +croak and +whisper.

<voice filename> is a file within the espeak-data/voices directory.
<variant> is a file within the espeak-data/voices/!v directory.

the "f2" voice variant which changes the formants and the pitch range to give a female sound

# espeak-ng -v en+f2  “hello”

"af" is the Afrikaans voice

# espeak-ng -v <language code> “hello”

eg:-1).espeak-ng -v af "hello"

2).espeak-ng -v hi "hello"

# espeak-ng --voices

# date | espeak-ng -v <language code> -s 140 

it will anounce the date in your required language.