eSpeak - Introduction

[Jonathan Duddington]

I've just found this mailing list from a comment on the
espeak.sourceforge.net forum.  It's good to see people using (or trying
to use) eSpeak.

eSpeak is not new, I originally wrote it about 10 years ago for the
Acorn/RISC OS platform.  The Linux version is a re-write of the code
which I've been doing over the past few months.  I'm definitely not an
expert on Linux system programming or system administration, so I'll
probably need to ask for help in those areas if the need arises.

eSpeak uses the "sinusoidal" technique of synthesis.  Basically it
makes vowels and sonorant consonants, eg. [r,l,m,n,w] by adding
together the sine waves of harmonics in varying proportions.

Unvoiced consonants such as [h,t,s,f,k] are simply recorded sound
samples, while voiced consonants eg [v,z,d,g] are a mixture of these
two methods.

It should be interesting to see what are the specific needs of a TTS
engine for use with speakup, and how eSpeak can be improved to give a
better match to them.

I've been using eSpeak on Linux mostly with the KDE TTS system (KTTS). 
I don't know anything about speakup or speech-despatcher yet, other
than a quick look at the speakup user guide.

A problem has been reported with eSpeak, where it locks up when it
finds the sound device is already in use.  I've made a fix for this for
the next release, which I'll probably make in a few days.  Perhaps
there are some other changes that will be useful too.  Let me know :-)