Description:

eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English and other
languages. eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a
different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and
sounds quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I
find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long
periods.
- It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or
from stdin. A library version is also available (isn't available in
this package).
- Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
- Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
- SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not complete),
and also HTML.
- Compact size. The program and its data, including several languages,
totals about 420 kbytes.
- Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a
front end for another speech synthesis engine.
- Potential for other languages. Several are included (e.g. Polish
language) in varying stages of progress. Help from native speakers for
these or other languages is welcomed.
- Development tools available for producing and tuning phoneme data.
- Written in C++.

It works well as a "Talker" with the KDE text to speech system (KTTS),
as an alternative to Festival for example. As such, it can speak text
which has been selected into the clipboard, or directly from the
Konquerer browser or the Kate editor.