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Espeak by Cainteoir Technologies

A text-to-speech program that supports many languages!

A man speaking and gesturing towards a computer | © Unsplash.com

A man speaking with a computer (Unsplash.com)

What is Espeak?

Espeak is a small and lightweight text-to-speech program that can read aloud the text on your screen. If you need to be eyes or hands free, this program may help you to still use your device. For example, it can be used to listen to your favorite blogs or news sites on both your computer or Android device. Additionally, the programme offers different voices, whose characteristics can be altered. However it’s good to note that although the speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, the voice is not as natural or smooth as programmes based on human recordings.

How can Espeak help?

Espeak can help you to remain hands or eyes free and also has a feature which allows you to produce speech outputs as a WAV file. It also offers different settings for the voice. This includes settings to change the speech rate (words per minute), the pitch, base pitch, and also volume. Espeak can also be used in many other languages. The following are the languages currently offered:

  • Afrikaans
  • Albanian
  • Aragonese
  • Armenian
  • Bulgarian, Cantonese
  • Catalan
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Esperanto
  • Estonian
  • Farsi
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Georgian
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Indonesian
  • Irish
  • Italian
  • Kannada
  • Kurdish
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Lojban
  • Macedonian
  • Malaysian
  • Malayalam
  • Mandarin
  • Nepalese
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Punjabi
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian
  • Slovak
  • Spanish
  • Swahili
  • Swedish
  • Tamil
  • Turkish
  • Vietnamese
  • Welsh

Where can I find Espeak?

Espeak is available for Linux, Windows, OSX, and Android. 

If you would like to use Espeak on your Android device (requires 4.0 and up), check out the Google Play Store to download.

To use on the computer, check out the Espeak website here: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/


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