ESpeak can generate text-to-speech (TTS) audio files. These can be useful for many reasons, such as creating your own Turing (Captcha) tests that are capable of speaking its challenge. This article will cover how to install eSpeak and create a simple TTS audio file in .wav
format on Ubuntu 18.04.
Install eSpeak
Log in as the root
user and update the system
# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y
Next, install eSpeak.
# apt-get install espeak
Generate your first TTS audio file
Test eSpeak by asking it to sound out the letters y j w c t j
while writing the output as a .wav
file named espeak-talk.wav
in the /tmp/
directory. Next, we tell it we want a word gap of 60, the pause between words. We also tell it we want a pitch of 70 and a readout speed of 100.
# espeak "y j w c t j" -w /tmp/espeak-talk.wav -g 60 -p 70 -s 100 -v en-uk
You will now have a file named espeak-talk.wav
located in /tmp/
.