eSpeak: speech synthesis Reviews

In one word: Awesome! eSpeak is an amazing project! If you just want some text read out loud, or saved to a WAV file, you can paste it into the TTSApp and click a button. If you want to process a batch of text files, or SSML documents, there's a handy command line interface. Seriously awesome stuff here and extremely easy to use. I've been using eSpeak while editing poetry and prose to get a general feel of how the writing sounds out loud. Sure, the voice is missing the intonation and some of the inflection but, the intonation and inflection I'd get from bothering a friend to read hundreds of pages of unfinished work would be . . . inaccurate to put it nicely. To improve the reading of poetry I use the -l command line option set to 75 characters. It makes eSpeak put a very short pause at every line break on lines shorter than 75 characters. This also helps when reading prose because titles, subtitles, and headings are often quite short and lack punctuation. To have eSpeak use several voices in a single file I use the SSML markup language. It is truly amazing! I just wrap the bits of text for each different character with some simple markup telling eSpeak which voice to use and BAM! I get multiple characters reading the file like magic!