eSpeak Macintosh Installer
Greg Kearney has put together an eSpeak Macintosh Installer. eSpeak is an open source software speech synthesizer that works in a large number of different languages. It also recognises SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language).
At the moment, eSpeak is not intergrated with the Speech Manager so it can’t be used as a system voice with OS X. This means you can’t select an eSpeak voice as the default voice so you can’t use it with VoiceOver or any of the other things built into Mac OS X that let you select a voice to use - such as announcing the time. This is something that is being worked on by several people though, so look forward to eSpeak being available as a system voice in the future. For now, Greg has written an eSpeak Utility which will use the eSpeak voices when text is pasted into it. The installer will install both eSpeak and the utility program.
At the moment, eSpeak does text to speech synthesis for the following languages, some better than others: Afrikaans, Cantonese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lojban, Macedonian, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Vietnamese, Welsh. The Languages page has more complete information and will always be up to date. eSpeak is also constructed so that adding or improving a language can be done by anybody and contributed back to the project for all to take advantage of. The web page comments:
Most of the work doesn’t need any programming knowledge. Just an understanding of the language, an awareness of its features, patience and attention to detail.
It’s fantastic to see these free open source voices available for Mac users. There are a lot of people who occasionally want to hear something in a foreign language but don’t need the ability enough to want to purchase a commercial voice, or just plain can’t afford to pay for a commercial voice. This is a great alternative and fills this niche fantastically.
Website: eSpeak Macintosh Installer
- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac
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I’ve been looking for something like this for YEARS!
THANKYOU!
@Francis: Glad to be of help! I haven’t had the time to look at espeak recently, so if there’s updates I’ve missed please let me know and I can add the information here.
Ricky
Very interesting, will really look forward to an Speech Manager version. Would be terrific to be able to show sight impaired user here in Sweden, that there is an free text to speech for swedish, for Mac OS X.
@Örjan, developing a Speech Manager compliant version of a synthesizer is far from straightforward so it may still be a while before they do that. For a synthesizer to be really useful for a sight impaired user Speech Manager compliance is very important, because otherwise the voices cannot be used with Apple’s VoiceOver. How do you, as a Swedish speaker think the quality of the MBROLA synthesizer compares with the Swedish Infovox iVox voices for Mac? If I listen to the Dutch MBROLA voice it is clearly of an older far less natural and comprehensible sounding generation, compared to the Dutch Infovox iVox voices. Maybe I am biased, because I am involved with the distribution of the Infovox iVox voices, but to me the real benefit of the MBROLA voices is not their availability for languages for which good, more modern commercial synthesizers are available, but the availability of more exotic languages for which no modern Mac compatible solution is available. It would be great if such exotic voices could also be used as System Voices on the Mac.
davidn´s most recent blog post: Apple reseller now includes British Infovox iVox voices with every Mac