Sunday, February 8, 2015

Text To Speech and Translation Application For Ubuntu Linux - Gespeaker

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. eSpeak 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 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.

Gespeaker is a GTK+ front-end for espeak. It allows to play a text in many languages with settings for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap. The text played can also be recorded to WAV file.

Gespeaker supports multiple languages, currently English, Italian, French and Spanish. It works well with both Gnome, XFCE, LXDE environments.

Gespeaker Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to install Gespeaker:

sudo apt-get install gespeaker
Currently Ubuntu packagers does not include mbrola in the official repositories, Ubuntu users will need to install mbrola and the voices from the Ubuntu Trucchi repository in this way from the terminal type following command:
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntutrucchi.list http://www.ubuntutrucchi.it/repository/ubuntutrucchi.list
wget -O - http://www.ubuntutrucchi.it/repository/ubuntutrucchi.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update 
After successful installation you can open the Gespeaker from the Unity 'Dash'


Using Gespeaker is easy, just enter text in the available text box, select a voice type (male or female), and a language from the drop down list. Click on Play button to hear the playback of the entered text in a selected language. You can also record the sound using the Record option.

Gespeaker also allows to play a text in many languages with settings  for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap.

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