Looking for text to speech applications

JosephS · 08-13-2008, 04:07 PM

I would like to hear about good text to voice applications for linux. I did a
search on Google, but didn't find much on personal experiences.

I have Festival and flite installed. They don't sound that good to me,
although this is the only experience I've had with text to speech. Are there
other applications that would work on linux and sound better, or is this as
good as it gets?

Hopefully applications I could download as a binary, or that aren't to hard to build.

Thanks.

MS3FGX · 08-13-2008, 04:11 PM

Now that you mention it, all of the Linux text to speech synthesizers I have used have sounded pretty bad. I am not aware of any open source synthesizer that compares to the Mac text to speech system, or even Microsoft's offering for that matter.

brianL · 08-13-2008, 06:08 PM

An alternative is espeak. There's a thread in the Slackware forum about TTS, and gnashley has a package for it. Debian will have it too.
(I've been messing about with it this week - good for frightening the neighbours)

matthewg42 · 08-13-2008, 06:17 PM

Not sure about Linux ones apart from those already mentioned. I wish we had something which sounded as good as the AT&T text-to-speech demo.