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
Francis Douse September 18, 2008 at 11:06 am
I’ve been looking for something like this for YEARS!
THANKYOU!
Ricky Buchanan September 18, 2008 at 1:10 pm
@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
Örjan Larsson September 28, 2008 at 7:54 pm
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.
davidn September 29, 2008 at 1:05 am
@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
José-Gerardo Alvarado February 9, 2009 at 10:21 am
Hello Ricky,
I happened upon your page today because I was talking to a friend of mine who has suddenly developed serious eye problems. Before this recent event she was able to complete a doctorate in social psychology. What I’m looking for is a program that she can use to listen to text. I work on a Macintosh but she’s in the Windows world. Do you have anything to recommend?
I will be downloading your program today so maybe by the time you get back to me I’ll have other questions or observations to share with you. As a final note, my friend lives in Argentina and understands some English but she does most of her work in Spanish. I’ve offered to look into some technological tools that she can use to stay active in the academic field she loves.
Thanks,
José G. Alvarado
Ricky Buchanan February 11, 2009 at 11:31 am
@José: I don’t know the specifics for Windows, but I know it can do the job. In terms of OS X she would really need one of the voices from AssistiveWare or Cepstral – the Text-to-speech in Languages Other Than English page lists both. The eSpeak voices are not really of a high enough quality to do much work with. The interface (screen reader) for blind OS X users is called VoiceOver and comes free with every OS X computer, we have written about VoiceOver Getting Started Documentation and also using VoiceOver in languages other than English.
Michael June 29, 2010 at 1:01 am
Can some one tell me how do you uninstall the mac version?? I wanted it to speak chinese text but it didn’t work out.
Тim September 4, 2011 at 3:37 am
Just wanted to thank you for all the effort with espeak. My future wife speaks russian and it has been my great desire to master this language. Having learnt the Cyrillic alphabet, I am now able to read and write Russian, though slowly. But when I listen to Russians speaking, the language is still so new to my brain, it appears as if the natives speak too fast. Now , with espeak, I trust the accent will soon be familiar and normal as I hear it more frequently.