Text to speech
Text-to-speech (TTS) softwares are programs used to transform a text into an audio file which can then be played. Such programs are used by blind people to be able to use computers but can also be used to simply improve computer experience.
eSpeak is "a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows".
- open source
- available in the community repository
- supports more than 35 languages as of today (24/03/2009)
Festival is "a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech."
- free software
- available in the extra repository.
See the detailed article: Festival
mbrola is a non-free phonemes-to-audio program. mbrola supports more than 70 languages as of today (24/03/2009).
See the detailed article: mbrola
speech-dispatcher is a "common interface to speech synthesis". It has backends for espeak, festival, and a few other speech synthesizers.
- available in extra respository