LINUX ESPEAK-NG COMMAND AND ITS OPTIONS

What is espeak-ng?

The eSpeak NG is a compact open-source software text-to-speech synthesizer for Linux, Windows, Android, and other operating systems. It supports more than 100 languages and accents. It is based on the eSpeak engine created by Jonathan Duddington.

eSpeak NG uses a “formant synthesis” method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

eSpeak NG is available as:

• A command-line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
• A shared library version for use by other programs. (On Windows this is a DLL).
• eSpeak NG has been ported to other platforms, including Solaris and Mac OSX.

Features:

• Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
• Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
• SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not complete), and also HTML.
• Compact size: The program and its data, including many languages, totals about a few Mbytes.
• Can translate text into small codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
• Potential for other languages: Several languages are included in varying stages of progress. Help from native speakers of these or other languages is welcome.
• Written in C.

Syntax: espeak-ng [options] [words]

Eg:

espeak-ng "This is a test"
              Speak the sentence "This is a test" using the default English voice.

Some options of espeak-ng are discussed below:

1. — version : Prints the espeak library version and the location of the espeak voice data.

2. -f <text file> : Text file to speak.

3. -a <integer>: amplitude, 0 to 200. Default value is 100.

4. -x : Speak the word using the default English voice and print the phonemes that were spoken.

5. — voices : List all voices supported by espeak.

6. — voices=en : list all voices that speak English (en).

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