ESpeak
ESpeak
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ESpeak

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ESpeak

eSpeak is a free and open-source, cross-platform, compact, software speech synthesizer. It uses a formant synthesis method, providing many languages in a relatively small file size. eSpeakNG (Next Generation) is a continuation of the original developer's project with more feedback from native speakers.

Because of its small size and many languages, eSpeakNG is included in NVDA open source screen reader for Windows, as well as Android, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. Its predecessor eSpeak was recommended by Microsoft in 2016 and was used by Google Translate for 27 languages in 2010; 17 of these were subsequently replaced by proprietary voices.

The quality of the language voices varies greatly. In eSpeakNG's predecessor eSpeak, the initial versions of some languages were based on information found on Wikipedia. Some languages have had more work or feedback from native speakers than others. Most of the people who have helped to improve the various languages are blind users of text-to-speech.

In 1995, Jonathan Duddington released the Speak speech synthesizer for RISC OS computers supporting British English. On 17 February 2006, Speak 1.05 was released under the GPLv2 license, initially for Linux, with a Windows SAPI 5 version added in January 2007. Development on Speak continued until version 1.14, when it was renamed to eSpeak.

Development of eSpeak continued from 1.16 (there was not a 1.15 release) with the addition of an eSpeakEdit program for editing and building the eSpeak voice data. These were only available as separate source and binary downloads up to eSpeak 1.24. The 1.24.02 version of eSpeak was the first version of eSpeak to be version controlled using subversion, with separate source and binary downloads made available on SourceForge. From eSpeak 1.27, eSpeak was updated to use the GPLv3 license. The last official eSpeak release was 1.48.04 for Windows and Linux, 1.47.06 for RISC OS and 1.45.04 for macOS. The last development release of eSpeak was 1.48.15 on 16 April 2015.

eSpeak uses the Usenet scheme to represent phonemes with ASCII characters.

On 25 June 2010, Reece Dunn started a fork of eSpeak on GitHub using the 1.43.46 release. This started off as an effort to make it easier to build eSpeak on Linux and other POSIX platforms.

On 4 October 2015 (6 months after the 1.48.15 release of eSpeak), this fork started diverging more significantly from the original eSpeak.

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