Gespeaker is a GTK+ frontend for eSpeak and mbrola. It allows to play a text in many languages with settings for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap. The text played can also be recorded to WAV file.

Since version 0.6 it supports mbrola voices, it will require mbrola package and one or more mbrola voices from Debian repository or Ubuntu Trucchi repository.

Multiple languages are supported, currently English, Italian, French and Spanish. It works well with both Gnome, XFCE, LXDE environments.

Installation

Just download the deb package and install with this command:

sudo dpkg -i PACKAGENAME

Then find Gespeaker under Applications -> Sound & Video menu.

Enable enhanced voice support

Default voices are scrannel, to get a more realistic speech need install mbrola package.

mbrola is not in the official repositories, so add following:

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntutrucchi.list http://www.ubuntutrucchi.it/repository/ubuntutrucchi.list

wget -O - http://www.ubuntutrucchi.it/repository/ubuntutrucchi.asc | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update

Now install the mbrola support:

sudo apt-get install mbrola

then one or more voice packages must be installed from the following table:

Description Package name
Afrikaans male mbrola-af1
Brazilian Portuguese male mbrola-br3
Croatian male mbrola-cr1
Czech male mbrola-cz2
German male mbrola-de6
German female mbrola-de7
British English male mbrola-en1
Spanish male mbrola-es1
French female mbrola-fr4
Greek male mbrola-gr2
Hungarian male mbrola-hu1
Indonesian male mbrola-id1
Italian male mbrola-it3
Italian female mbrola-it4
Latin male mbrola-la1
Dutch male mbrola-nl2
Polish female mbrola-pl1
European Portuguese female mbrola-pt1
Romanian male mbrola-ro1
Swedish male mbrola-sw1
Swedish female mbrola-sw2
American English female mbrola-us1
American English male mbrola-us2

Install a package language with:

sudo apt-get install mbrola-us2

This will install the American English male voice for mbrola.

Finally, you can choose the voice in Language box under Base settings by drop-down menu(See the picture 1.)

Check on http://code.google.com/p/gespeaker/