• Build Dependencies
  • Debian
• Building
• Testing
• Installing
• Building Voices
• Adding New Voices
• Historical Releases
• Bugs
• License Information

This branch contains changes to eSpeak to support building on a POSIX system by using autotools.

This does the following things:

1. compile the libespeak library;
2. compile the speak and espeak command-line applications;
3. compile the espeakedit application;
4. compile the voice data, creating an espeak-data directory.

This branch also contains some bug fixes and improvements that get sent back upstream.

In order to build eSpeak, you need:

1. a functional autotools system (make, autoconf, automake, libtool and pkg-config);
2. a functional c++ compiler;
3. wxWidgets development libraries (needed to build and run espeakedit to compile the phoneme data).

Optionally, you need:

1. the pulseaudio development library to enable pulseaudio output;
2. the portaudio development library to enable portaudio output.

The espeak and espeakedit programs, along with the espeak voices, can be built via the standard autotools commands:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make

NOTE: The configure command detects various platform differences that the espeak makefiles don't cater for (e.g. different wxWidgets version) and detect the available audio setup to use automatically.

Before installing, you can test the built espeak using the following command:

$ ESPEAK_DATA_PATH=`pwd` LD_LIBRARY_PATH=src:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH} src/espeak ...

The ESPEAK_DATA_PATH variable needs to be set to use the espeak data from the source tree. Otherwise, espeak will look in $(HOME) or /usr/share/espeak-data.

The LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set as espeak uses the libespeak.so shared library. This ensures that espeak uses the built shared library in the src directory and not the one on the system (which could be an older version).

You can install eSpeak by running the following command:

$ sudo make LIBDIR=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu install

The LIBDIR path may be different to the one on your system (the above is for 64-bit Debian/Ubuntu releases that use the multi-arch package structure -- that is, Debian Wheezy or later).

You can find out where espeak is installed to on your system if you already have an espeak install by running:

$ find /usr/lib | grep libespeak

If you are modifying a language's phoneme, voice or dictionary files, you can just build that voice by running:

$ make <lang-code>

For example, if you add entries in the dictsource/en_extra file, you can run:

$ make en

to build an English voice file with those changes in without rebuilding all the voices. This will make it easier to spot errors.

Once you have added the necessary files to eSpeak to support the new voice, you can then run:

$ ./mkdictlist Makefile.am

This will update the build system so that make will build the new voice in addition to building everything else, and add a <lang-code> target for building just that voice.

1.24.02 is the first version of eSpeak to appear in the subversion repository, but releases from 1.05 to 1.24 are available on the sourceforge website at http://sourceforge.net/projects/espeak/files/espeak/.

These early releases have been checked into the historical branch, with the 1.24.02 release as the last entry. This makes it possible to use the replace functionality of git to see the earlier history:

$ git replace 8d59235f 63c1c019

NOTE: The source releases contain the big_endian, espeak-edit, praat-mod, riskos, windows_dll and windows_sapi folders. These do not appear in the source repository until later releases, so have been excluded from the historical commits to align them better with the 1.24.02 source commit.

Report bugs to the espeak issues page on GitHub.

eSpeak Text-to-Speech is released under the GPL version 3 or later license.