Ubuntu espeak is a speech synthesizer for English (and several other languages) which will convert text to speech.
You can straight away execute espeak command on your Ubuntu machine without any installation or configuration.
In this article, let us review 8 examples of espeak command.
espeak Example 1: Speak the words specified in command line
This is the default usage.
# espeak --stdout 'words to speak' | aplay
Note: The above may also display the following message: “Playing WAVE ‘stdin’ : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 22050 Hz, Mono”
espeak Example 2: Speak the words specified in stdin
This will take the words interactively from the standard input and convert it to speech.
# espeak --stdout | aplay
espeak Example 3: Speak your document
This will convert the text from the mydocument.txt to speech.
# espeak --stdout -t mydocument.txt | aplay
espeak Example 4: Generate voice file from text document
Convert your text file to an audio file as shown below.
# espeak -t mydocument.txt -w myaudio.wav
Customizing espeak
If you find the default speech synthesizing is not good, you can try to customize it as explained below.
espeak Example 5: List all available voice languages
# espeak --voices Pty Language Age/Gender VoiceName File Other Langs 5 af M afrikaans af 5 bs M bosnian bs 5 ca M catalan ca 5 cs M czech cs 5 cy M welsh-test cy 5 de M german de 5 el M greek el 5 en M default default 5 en-sc M en-scottish en/en-sc (en 4) .......
espeak Example 6: Choose a different voice language
The following will use “en-uk” – British english to translate the text to speech.
# espeak -v en-uk --stdout 'reading tips & tricks in TGS' | aplay
espeak Example 7: Increase or Decrease the number of spoken words per minute.
The default is 160 words per minute. You can reduce it using option -s as shown below.
# espeak -s 140 -f mydocument.txt | aplay
espeak Example 8: List the available espeak voices in specific language
The following example will display all possible english language variation that you can use for your text to speech conversion.
# espeak --voice=en Pty Language Age/Gender VoiceName File Other Langs 2 en-uk M english en/en (en 2) 3 en-uk M english-mb-en1 mb/mb-en1 (en 2) 2 en-us M english-us en/en-us (en-r 5)(en 3) 5 en-sc M en-scottish en/en-sc (en 4) 5 en M default default .....
