Debian Accessibility Speech Synthesis packages

Daisy-player is a command-line player for talking books based on the Digital Accessible Information System protocol. It is comparable in functionality, features, and ease of use with commercial players, and has a simple user interface appropriate for Braille terminals.

EFlite is a speech server for Emacspeak and other screen readers that allows them to interface with Festival Lite, a free text-to-speech engine developed at the CMU Speech Center as an off-shoot of Festival.

Due to limitations inherited from its backend, EFlite does only provide support for the English language at the moment.

eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and some other languages.

eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source text to speech (TTS) engines, and sounds quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but some find the articulation 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.

• Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
• Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
• Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
• Potential for other languages. More than 40 languages are included.
• Compact size. The program and its data total about 350 kbytes.
• Written in C++.

Flite is a small fast run-time speech synthesis engine. It is the latest addition to the suite of free software synthesis tools including University of Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System and Carnegie Mellon University's FestVox project, tools, scripts and documentation for building synthetic voices. However, flite itself does not require either of these systems to run.

It currently only supports the English and Indic languages.

This package contains the executables and documentation.

Speech Dispatcher provides a device independent layer for speech synthesis. It supports various software and hardware speech synthesizers as backends and provides a generic layer for synthesizing speech and playing back PCM data via those different backends to applications.

Various high level concepts like enqueueing vs. interrupting speech and application specific user configurations are implemented in a device independent way, therefore freeing the application programmer from having to yet again reinvent the wheel.

This package contains Speech Dispatcher itself.

This package contains the various highly useful utility programs that use and accompany the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library. Audio software and some basic signal processing software is included in this package.

The following programs are available: na_play: generic playback program for use with net_audio and CSTR ao. ch_wave: Waveform file conversion program. ch_lab: label file conversion program. ch_track: Track file conversion program. wagon: a CART tree build and test program

See /usr/share/doc/speech-tools/README for detail list of programs available.

This package provides Russian support to Festival speech synthesis system.

FreeTTS is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the Java(TM) programming language. It is based upon Flite, a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Flite in turn is derived from the Festival Speech Synthesis System from the University of Edinburgh and the FestVox project from Carnegie Mellon University.

Gespeaker is a GTK+ frontend for eSpeak and mbrola. It allows one to play a text in many languages with settings for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap.

Since version 0.6 it can use mbrola package and voices to obtain a more realistic text reading experience.

Say the current time through your sound card. Requires you have a sound output device available.

Sonic is a very simple utility that reads and writes wav files, and speeds them up or slows them down, with low distortion. The key new feature in Sonic versus other libraries is very high quality at speed up factors well over 2X.

Speech Dispatcher provides a device independent layer for speech synthesis. It supports various software and hardware speech synthesizers as backends and provides a generic layer for synthesizing speech and playing back PCM data via those different backends to applications.

Various high level concepts like enqueueing vs. interrupting speech and application specific user configurations are implemented in a device independent way, therefore freeing the application programmer from having to yet again reinvent the wheel.

This package contains dependencies on packages necessary for running Speech Dispatcher with Festival.

This Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine speaks French; a preliminary English support is also offered. The engine uses context-sensitive rules to produce phonemes from the text. It relies on MBROLA to generate actual audio output from the phonemes. The TTS engine is implemented using the Python programming language.

The upstream authors have come up with this TTS to try and meet their own needs as blind users. It's designed to be plugged as output to some screen-review software, firstly with BRLTTY. They favor speed and intelligibility over perfect pronunciation. Cicero is aimed to have a quick response time, the ability to quickly shut-up and skip to another utterance, intelligibility where it counts (not perfect pronunciation), the ability to track speech progression, relative simplicity (hackability) and relative small code size.

The SVOX Pico engine is a software speech synthesizer for German, English (GB and US), Spanish, French and Italian.

SVOX produces a clear and distinct speech output made possible by the use of Hidden Markov Model (HMM) algorithms.

This package contains binary files including pico2wave.

Mbrola is Thierry Dutoit's phonemizer for multilingual speech synthesis. The various diphone databases are distributed on separate packages, but they must be used with and only with Mbrola because of license matters. Read the copyright for details.

Mbrola itself doesn't provide full TTS. It is a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones. It takes a list of phonemes as input, together with prosodic information (duration of phonemes and a piecewise linear description of pitch), and produces speech samples on 16 bits (linear), at the sampling frequency of the diphone database.

Use Mbrola along with Freephone, cicero or espeak to have a complete text-to-speech in English.