Welcome to Speakups Webpage

Speakup, written by Kirk Reiser and Andy Berdan, is a screen review package for the Linux operating system.

Speakup allows you to interact with applications and the GNU/Linux operating system with audible feedback from the console using a synthetic speech device.

Speakup is licensed under the GPL; the GNU General Public License.

Speakup allows you to navigate around the screen using the typical screen review functions such as say word, say line, announce cursor position, which console your currently on, and much, much more. It also allows one to load in configuration parameters for controlling various aspects of the synthesizer you are using, as well as speakup itself. You can review the current default key assignments here.

Currently, the following synthesizers are supported by speakup:

Accent PC/SA
the Apollo2
Artic Transport
Audapter
Braille 'N Speak / Type 'N Speak
Dectalk External and Express
the Dectalk PC internal as a module.
DoubleTalk PC/LT
LiteTalk
the Keynote Gold PC internal.
Speakout
Speakup softsynth device
Tuxtalk software synth as a module.
The speech Dispatcher daemon which currently supports Festival, Flite, Apolo II and the DECTalk software speech engine.

Additional synthesizer drivers are constantly being considered or developed and will be available soon. If you would like your favorite speech synthesizer to work with speakup, please let us know. Send a message to Kirk with your request.

The synthesizers which are in development or waiting for other changes to speakup include:

Infovox
Keynote family of synths.
TrippleTalk USB

If you are wondering about the Artic Synphonix, Sounding Board, or Accent Messenger, these synths have no TTS (text to speech) algorithms built-in so system level drivers would be required to operate them. As far as we know, none of the manufacturers of these synths are willing to make their driver code available.

There are a number of synths which we have not undertaken to write drivers for yet because we do not either have a synth to work with or cannot get documentation. The TrippleTalk PCI falls into this category.

Speakup is available for the top three distributions Debian, Slackware and Fedora Core from the disks area of this website. You can install the entire GNU/Linux system with speech.

Speakup is a set of kernel patches which means you should have some kernel building experience before attempting to install it from source code. We have tried to make the patching and configuration as painless as possible, but kernel compilation is an involved process requiring a good understanding of your hardware.

Speakup currently works on Linux kernels, 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x although 2.2.x and 2.4.x development have been discontinued in cvs.

Go to our Index Page to find the programs, patches, docs and files with descriptions of each or go to our Ftp Site to find more

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This file last modified on: Monday, 06-Feb-2006 15:07:04 EST