A portable open source text-to-speech synthesizer for Linux, Windows, Android, and other operating systems is called eSpeak NG. More than 100 languages and accents are supported. It is built using Jonathan Duddington’s eSpeak engine.
The “formant synthesis” method is used by eSpeak NG. This makes it possible to supply several languages in a compact footprint. The voice is understandable and fast-moving, but it lacks the naturalness and smoothness of larger synthesizers that are built on recordings of actual speech. Additionally, it enables the usage of MBROLA as a backend speech synthesizer and Klatt formant synthesis.
You may get eSpeak NG as:
a command-line application (Linux and Windows) that reads text from stdin or files.
a shared library version that other programs can utilize. (This is a DLL on Windows).
For use with screen readers and other applications that support the Windows SAPI5 interface, a SAPI5 version for Windows is available.
Other platforms, such as Solaris and Mac OS X, have had eSpeak NG ports made for them.
Features
includes many Voices with adjustable features.
speech output that can be saved as a WAV file.
Both HTML and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) are supported, though not entirely.
small size. The application and its data, which includes numerous languages, take up only a small number of Mbytes.
MBROLA diphone voices may be used as a front-end. Text is converted to phonemes with information on pitch and length using eSpeak NG.
It could be modified to serve as a front end for another speech synthesis engine because it can convert text into phoneme codes.
Possibility of additional languages. There are several in various phases of development. Native speakers of these or other languages are welcome to offer assistance.
composed in C.
Compatibility with eSpeak
The espeak-ng binaries make use of the same command-line arguments as espeak, but with a few extras to add new capabilities from espeak-ng, like choosing the output audio device name to use. The build makes symlinks between talk and speak-ng as well as espeak and espeak-ng.
With an optional symlink in espeak/speak lib.h, the espeak speak lib.h include file can be found in espeak-ng/speak lib.h. The ESPEAK API macro was modified to fix building on Windows, and a few minor adjustments were made to the documentation comments. This file provides the ESPEAK 1.48.15 API. Espeak and this C API are API and ABI compatible.
To prevent conflicts with espeak, the espeak-data data has been transferred to the espeak-ng-data. The voice, vocabulary, and phoneme files have undergone numerous changes that render them incompatible with espeak.
The espeakedit application is not part of the espeak-ng project. The process of creating the dictionary, phoneme, and intonation binary files has been moved into the libespeak-ng.so file, which is accessible via the C API and espeak-ng command line.
