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/