espeak TTS : free Open Source tts engine for android supporting 60 languages

[Harry van der Wolf]

Hi,

I just came across eSpeak TTS for android. It's available from Google Play (1) and supports 60 (!) languages, having its project site on Google (2). It's the android port of eSpeak (3), also on Google.
Google TTS only supports 6 languages (english uk and us, french, german, spanish, italian)  natively on your tablet/phone so eSpeak offers a lot more.
Note that Google's quality is much better. If you are on one of these 6 languages I would certainly not switch to espeak (although Google is slow and espeak is fast)

One word of advice: This is still beta software (at least I consider it definitely as beta software).

After download but before (!) starting it you have to create a folder "espeak" on your sd-card and internal memory. If you don't do this espeak hangs on startup as it tries to save voice data but can't do this as it is missing that espeak folder (stupid bug). It also crashes after having changed the settings, but it does store the settings and uses them.

The voice sounds still very robotic especially for the less well known languages (like Dutch for me), but at least I have now a free open source (like OsmAnd) tts voice that understandably speaks the full texts, including next street instructions, as now possible in the new OsmAnd 1.5.

Another word of advice: On my phone the Dutch voice speaks way too fast. The eSpeak program has only the 1x (default), 2x, 3x and faster multipliers. So that's not useful.
In your Android settings itself for language & input, in the "text-to-speech output", you can also set the speech rate from "normal"(default) to slow or very slow. That worked for me.

Happy testing.

Harry


(1): <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.googlecode.eyesfree.espeak>
(2): <https://code.google.com/p/eyes-free/>
(3): <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>

[Onkar Shinde]

I am surprised you discovered it right now. For quite few languages (like Hindi from India) it is the only TTS engine available in Android. It also happens to be the main reason I initially translated the voice prompts to Hindi by testing them first on Ubuntu and then Android.

Of course quite a few people complain about it robotic voices or bad pronunciation speed. But I believe this complaint is mostly towards the Android port and not espeak in general.

Note: That reminds me that I need to update the voice prompts in Hindi.

[Harry van der Wolf]

I knew it already for quite some time for Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and Mac OS X. I simply didn't know it was also available for Android.
And if this was already well known in the OsmAnd community then this is only a reminder for all the other (relatively) new OsmAnd users like me.

But I'm glad to hear that it is already being used on Android by OsmAnd users.

Harry

2013/7/28 Onkar Shinde <onkar...@gmail.com>

I am surprised you discovered it right now. For quite few languages (like Hindi from India) it is the only TTS engine available in Android. It also happens to be the main reason I initially translated the voice prompts to Hindi by testing them first on Ubuntu and then Android.

Of course quite a few people complain about it robotic voices or bad pronunciation speed. But I believe this complaint is mostly towards the Android port and not espeak in general.

Note: That reminds me that I need to update the voice prompts in Hindi.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Osmand" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to osmand+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Onkar Shinde]

By the way there is also a paid port of espeak for android >= 4.0. Have you tested it already?

[Rodolfo]

I tried espeak in Dutch, but was spontaneously scared off by this creep ;)
But they will probably get the voices better sometime.

[Harry van der Wolf]

No. I have not.

It is still the espeak engine using the lightweight voice-data which means that it still sounds robotic. If I pay for something I want the quality to be better.

Harry

2013/7/28 Onkar Shinde <onkar...@gmail.com>

By the way there is also a paid port of espeak for android >= 4.0. Have you tested it already?

--