What speech libraries are available in Linux? [closed]

Question

When it comes to TTS (text-to-speech) libraries in Linux, what choices do developers have?

What libraries ship with the majority of distros?

Are there minimal libraries? What functionality does each library offer?

I'm approaching this primarily from a C++ point of view, although Python would suit me too.

Answer 1

Ubuntu comes with eSpeak, which is quite simple to use. From the console, simply enter:

espeak "Hello World"

Other options include Festival and Flite. Festival is the most sophisticated one I've used so far, and I've successfully installed new, less artificial-sounding voices (for Ubuntu, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=677277). Flite is very simple but doesn't have the same level of customizability as Festival.

If you want, for example, a Python program that synthesizes speech, there is a somewhat inactive project called PyFestival that's quite easy to use (http://code.google.com/p/pyfestival/).

Answer 2

Use Flite as your speech library, and then use voices from festival or festvox.