# The audio/espeak port

## espeak-1.47.11 – compact speech synthesizer

## Description

    eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different
    synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds
    quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but
    the articulation is much clearer and easier to listen to for long
    periods.

    It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file
    or from stdin. A shared library version is also available.

        * 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 several
          languages, totals about 700 kbytes.
        * Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted
          as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
        * Potential for other languages. Several are included in varying
          stages of progress. Help from native speakers for these or
          other languages is welcomed.
        * Development tools available for producing and tuning phoneme data.

WWW: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

Categories:
  audio devel

## Library dependencies

- audio/portaudio-svn

## Build dependencies

- archivers/unzip
- devel/gmake

## Run dependencies