eSpeak

Cainteoir Technologies

About this app

The eSpeak engine is a small, lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) program that supports a large number of languages. It has a more robotic sounding voice than other engines due to its small size (see http://espeak.sourceforge.net/samples/raven.ogg for an example of what it sounds like). The trade-off for this somewhat harsher sound is a very responsive and resource-friendly engine with voices which remain intelligible at much higher speeds than other, more human-sounding alternatives.

This is a port of eSpeak to Android for 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and later (including Android 4.3), supporting all 79 languages and accents of eSpeak (see http://reecedunn.co.uk/espeak-for-android for the list).

It is built on the eyes-free version, fixing multiple issues found in the eyes-free version:

1. Compatibility with Android 4.3 (as of 1.47.11d);

2. Speech rate and pitch are correctly handled, so eSpeak on Android sounds like it does on the desktop;

3. Speech rate is set as words per minute

4. Pitch, base pitch and volume are configurable as percentages.

5. The eSpeak variant can be selected, including the NVDA voice variants.

6. Punctuation level and punctuation characters are configurable.

7. Languages are correctly selected (e.g. selecting Slovak and Slovenian, or selecting Cantonese Chinese);

8. Language names are correctly displayed (e.g. "Scottish English" is displayed as "English (United Kingdom, Scottish Standard English)" instead of "English (Saychelles)");

9. Accent and special characters are supported;

10. MIPS-based devices are supported;

11. Various memory leaks and crashes are fixed;

12. SSML is only processed if the SSML markup is wrapped in a tag.

13. Support for importing custom-built eSpeak dictionaries.

NOTE: When enabling eSpeak, you will get a message stating "This speech synthesis engine may be able to collect all the text that will be spoken, including personal data like passwords and credit card numbers. It comes from the eSpeak engine. Enable the use of this speech synthesis engine?". This is a standard warning issued by Android devices for accessibility software that comes from an external source.

The eSpeak engine does not collect any data in the text passed to it. All the source code to the core eSpeak engine and the Android port is available for you to verify this if you are concerned.

eSpeak: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
eSpeak for Android: https://github.com/rhdunn/espeak/tree/android

Any issues should be reported to https://github.com/rhdunn/espeak/issues.

The flags in the feature graphic are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike by Wikipedia. The lips were designed by Jonathan Duddington. The application icon and feature graphic were designed by Reece H. Dunn.

The eSpeak source code is licensed under GPLv3+ by Jonathan Duddington.

The Android port is derived from the eyes-free port by Google under the Apache 2.0 license. Additional modifications have been made by Reece H. Dunn, also under the Apache 2.0 license.

The Unicode character handling (for correct handling of accented and non-Latin characters) is provided by the ucd-tools project by Reece H. Dunn, licensed under the GPLv3+ license. This project uses data tables generated from the Unicode Character Database (UCD) by http://unicode.org.

Ratings and reviews

Good tts engine alternative to "Speech Services by Google" app. However, speech quality needs improvement. The app also needs speech to text capabilities in order to use voice input with keyboards. Thank you!

Brazilian Portuguese voice is awful.. I don't even know if it is trying to read, say the syllables or just having an aneurysm. Fix that. It is beyond bad.

Last updated in 2015. Dev put this on sale for free for a limited time to generate more downloads to squeeze more money out of a dead horse once the sale ends.

What's new

What's New:

* Update eSpeak to 1.48.15
* Android 6.0 support
* Various TTS Voice API fixes
* Updates to the French and Italian voices