$ apt-cache show espeak
Package: espeak
Priority: optional
Section: sound
Installed-Size: 192
Maintainer: Mario Lang <mlang@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.29-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.6.1-1), libespeak1 (>= 1.29), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.2.1), libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1)
Filename: pool/main/e/espeak/espeak_1.29-1_i386.deb
Size: 60652
MD5sum: ea763f1134d7a1438a43f15f3e4e311c
SHA1: b785cd3dcf459037dbbd48d668026256c2393339
SHA256: 314d4abb3a932c359accb7a7ae60db466066882f6729973f4fa7af269be11682
Description: A multi-lingual software speech synthesizer
eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and some other
languages.
.
eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis
method from other open source text to speech (TTS) engines, and sounds quite
different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but some 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.
.
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.
.
* Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
* Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
* Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end
for another speech synthesis engine.
* Potential for other languages. Rudimentary (and probably humourous)
attempts at German and Esperanto are included.
* Compact size. The program and its data total about 350 kbytes.
* Written in C++.
Tag: implemented-in::c++, interface::commandline, role::program, sound::speech, works-with::audio