A small software synthesiser, espeak

[Michael Whapples]

I came across this, and it might be interesting for those of you trying to find a small, high quality, open source software speech synthesiser.
Espeak (http://espeak.sourceforge.net), it is definitely smaller than some of the alternatives at 350kb for the installation. The quality is understandable (it supposedly uses a different algorithm to some other open source ones so sounds different), but not to the same level as some commercial ones. Also it has some other language support, but that is in early stages supposedly.
I have managed to get it working on my laptop with speech-dispatcher with a modified generic.conf file, and getting fairly good response from it. So if any one would like to see that file, I can give you that. Installation instructions are in the commands.html file. Also to get it working with gentoo, it required some things not documented, it requires libportaudio.so.0 but portaudio only has libportaudio.so, just create a link. I was unable to compile it, but the linux binary works with that link.

From
Michael Whapples