espeak uses speech engine in the libespeak shared library. The libespeak library must first be installed.
@@ -28,6 +28,24 @@ then that will be used instead.
Some Linux distrubitions (eg. SuSe 10) have version 19 of PortAudio which has a slightly different API. The speak program can be compiled to use version 19 of PortAudio by copying the file portaudio19.h to portaudio.h before compiling.
The speak program may be compiled without using PortAudio, by removing the line
#define USE_PORTAUDIO
in the file speech.h.
+
+2.1.2 Use with KDE Text-to-Speech (KTTS)
+To add to KDE-Text-to-Speech Manager (KTTSMgr), use it as a "Command" talker
+with "command for speaking texts" set to:
+ cat %f | espeak --stdin -w %w -v en -s190
+
+In this example, "en" is the voice name, "190" is the speed.
+
+Note:
+
+- When used by the KTTS system, I noticed a slight background hiss with the speech, which is not present when I use espeak directly from the command line. This was because KDE sound default was set to "8 bits" rather than 16 bits.
+
- KTTSMgr breaks the text into sentences to pass to the speech engine, but it mistakenly assumes sentence breaks when dots follow abbreviations and therefore pauses after the dots in "eg. Mr. John B. Smith etc." Speaking a text file directly with espeak gives better results in this respect.
+
+
+
+2.1.3 Windows
+The installer: setup_espeak.exe installs the SAPI5 version of eSpeak. It also installs a command line program espeak in the espeak directory.
+
2.2 COMMAND OPTIONS
@@ -42,19 +60,7 @@ Or just type
followed by text on subsequent lines. Each line is spoken when
RETURN is pressed.
Use espeak -x to see the corresponding phoneme codes.
-2.2.2 Use with KDE Text-to-Speech (KTTS)
-To add to KDE-Text-to-Speech Manager (KTTSMgr), use it as a "Command" talker
-with "command for speaking texts" set to:
- cat %f | espeak --stdin -v en -w %w
-
-Note:
-
-- When used by the KTTS system, I noticed a slight background hiss with the speech, which is not present when I use espeak directly from the command line. This was because KDE sound default was set to "8 bits" rather than 16 bits.
-
- KTTSMgr breaks the text into sentences to pass to the speech engine, but it mistakenly assumes sentence breaks when dots follow abbreviations and therefore pauses after the dots in "eg. Mr. John B. Smith etc." Speaking a text file directly with espeak gives better results in this respect.
-
- Speaking text from a web page using KTTS often causes headings and image captions to be run together with the following text as a single sentence. Speaking the HTML directly with the -m option set (i.e. using espeak -m -f text.html), may help if this is a problem.
-
-
-2.2.3 The Command Line Options
+2.2.2 The Command Line Options
-
espeak [options] ["text words"]
@@ -170,11 +176,12 @@ Used with -w, it starts a new WAV file every <minutes&
--voices [=<language code>]
- Lists the available voices.
If =<language code> is present then only those voices which are suitable for that language are listed.
---voices=variant lists the voice variants (voice modifiers).
+--voices=mbrola lists the voices which use mbrola diphone voices. These are not included in the --voices list
+--voices=variant lists the voice variants (voice modifiers).
-2.2.4 The Input Text
+2.2.3 The Input Text
- HTML Input
-
@@ -182,8 +189,9 @@ If the -m option is used to indicate marked-up text, then HTML can be spoken dir
- Phoneme Input
-
-As well as plain text, phoneme mnemonics can be used in the text input to espeak. They are enclosed within double square brackets. Spaces are used to separate words and all stressed syllables must be marked explicitly.
- eg: [[D,Is Iz sVm f@n'EtIk t'Ekst 'InpUt]]
+As well as plain text, phoneme mnemonics can be used in the text input to espeak. They are enclosed within double square brackets. Spaces are used to separate words and all stressed syllables must be marked explicitly.
+ eg: espeak -v en [[D,Is Iz sVm f@n'EtIk t'Ekst 'InpUt]]
+ ("This is some phonetic text input").