Speak & Spell In Ubuntu?

By Randy Jensen | Apr 3, 2009

Ubuntu Logo Turns out Ubuntu has a seriously weird built in text-to-speech function available right in the terminal. It unfortunately sounds strikingly similar to Speak & Spell…just in case you weren’t around during the glory days of Speak & Spell (*ahem*), you seriously have to check this out first.

Now that you know why there is a generation of people who ‘can’t speak good’, I’m going to show you how to make Ubuntu talk.

Open a terminal and type
espeak "Luke, I am your father"
Just make sure you type ‘espeak’ and then follow that with a string of text in quotes (don’t forget to wrap it in quotes)

More Options

Espeak can do some other really cool things including saving to a WAV file and speaking in different voices. Here’s how.

Save as a WAV file

Enter:
espeak -w luke.wav "Luke, I am your father"

Change Voices

Enter:
espeak --voices=en
(That’s two dashes before ‘voices’. It may show up as one long em dash)
This will show a list of all the available voices. I had some trouble with a few of them, but it’s fun to play around and see what you can come up with.
Example:
espeak -v en-scottish "Luke, I am your Scottish father"

Not much to say for this tip, just stupid fun. I will say, however, that the ability to save to a WAV file could come in handy somehow….just not sure how yet.