DSpeech is a free, portable TTS program that can read written text files in different formats aloud (such as TXT, RTF, DOC, DOCX, and HTML files) and also has Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) functionality. The ASR allows you to use DSpeech to convert your own voice to text. The top ten text-to-speech software: 1. It is one of the best free text to speech tool in the category and there’s no doubt about it. It peruses the content out loud to you, as well as change voices. Download NaturalReader. It is a free text to speech programming. It can talk any content you write or duplicate to its window.

• Natural Reader Install Voices download free, software Programs online, free
• Natural Reader Install Voices download free, software Programs Online Game
• Natural Reader Install Voices download free, software Programs Online Without

1. Zabaware Text-to-Speech Reader with AT&T Natural Voices (ZBUHTTS10) Voices are between 500 and 1100 MB each and are available as a download immediately after purchase. It is recommended that you use a broadband internet connection due to the large size of the downloads. Bundle: Mike & Crystal - US English $29.95 Lauren - US English $24.95 Rich.
2. The Natural Reader is a download Text to Speech software available in both Windows and Mac versions and also offers a paid version with additional features. This software allows you to control the reading speed and lets you customize the voices from a set of choices.
3. AT&T Natural Voices Crystal 3.0.29 is free to download from our software library. The actual developer of the software is NextUp Technologies, LLC. The following versions: 3.0, 1.4 and 1.0 are the most frequently downloaded ones by the program users.
4. The program is sometimes referred to as 'NaturalReader7', 'NaturalReader Ver', 'NaturalReader9'. The most popular versions among the program users are 10.0, 9.6 and 9.5. NaturalReader is suitable for 32-bit versions of Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10. This free software is an intellectual property of.
5. Natural Reader is a free text to speech tool that can be used in a couple of ways. The first option is to load documents into its library and have them read aloud from there.

I am looking for some easy to install text to speech software for Ubuntu that sounds natural. I've installed Festival, Gespeaker, etc., but nothing sounds very natural. All very synthetic and hard to understand.

Any recommendations out there?

Jorge CastroI Heart UbuntuI Heart Ubuntu

14 Answers

SVOX pico2wave

A very minimalistic TTS, a better sounding than espeak or mbrola (to my mind). Some information here.

I don't understand why pico2wave is, compared to espeak or mbrola, rarely discussed. It's small, but sounds really good (natural). Without modification you'll hear a natural sounding female voice.

AND ... compared to Mbrola, it recognise Units and speaks it the right way!
For example:

• 2°C → two degrees
• 2m → two meters
• 2kg → two kilograms

After installation I use it in a script:

Then run it with the desired text:

or read the contents of an entire file:

That's all to have a lightweight, stable working TTS on Ubuntu.

Pablo Bianchiuser85321user85321

SpeakIt!

I believe Ive found the best TTS software for free using a Google Chrome extension called 'SpeakIt'. This only works in the Chrome browser for me on Ubuntu. It doesnt work with Chromium for some reason. SpeakIt comes with two female voices which both sound very realistic compared to everything else out there. There are at least four more male & female voices listed s Chrome extensions if you search the Chrome Web Store using 'TTS' as your query.

Usage: For use on a website. you highlight the text you want to be read and either right click and 'SpeakIt' or click the SpeakIt icon docked on the Chrome top bar.

Firefox users also have two options. Within Firefox addons, do a search for TTS and you should find 'Click Speak' and also 'Text to Voice'. The voices are not as good as the Chrome SpeakIt voices, but are definitely usable.

The SpeakIt extension uses iSpeech technology and for a price of $20 a year, the site can convert text to MP3 audio files. You can input text, URLs, RSS feeds, as well as documents such as TXT, DOC, and PDF and output to MP3. You can make podcast, embed audio, etc. Here is a link, and a sample of their audio (don't know how long the link will last).

Pablo BianchiI Heart UbuntuI Heart Ubuntu

Pico and espeak are fun and easy to get to work, but they're not all that good.The default Festival voices are also not that good. However, Festival is a scheme-based speech framework, where a number of researchers have built much better plug-in voices. You can easily surpass the pico2wave quality on stock Ubuntu, because one of those voices is available as a ready-made package.

To make Festival sound natural, here's what to do:

You can do it from the command line by using -b (or --batch) and putting each command into single quotes:

You can get other quite good voices from the Nitech repository, but installing them is finicky, and the default paths changed so the file name references in the bundled scheme files may need to be manually edited to work on stock Ubuntu.

Simple Google™ TTS

Update from project page (2019-02): This project is currently unmaintained and will remain so for the foreseeable future

Because of the lack of a better alternative I wrote a bash script that interfaces with a perl script by Michal Fapso to provide TTS via Google Translate. From the project description:

The intention is to provide an easy to use interface to text-to-speech output via Google's speech synthesis system. A fallback option using pico2wave automatically provides TTS synthesis in case no Internet connection is found.

Natural Reader Install Voices download free, software Programs online, free

As it stands, the wrapper supports reading from standard input, plain text files and the X selection (highlighted text).

The main features are:

• online TTS synthesis via Google translate
• offline TTS synthesis via pico2wave
• supports a variety of different languages
• can read from CLI, text files and highlighted text
• supports reading highlighted text with fixed formatting (e.g. PDF files)

Installation and usage are documented on the project page.

I'd be glad if you gave it a try. Bug reports and any other feedback are welcome!

Pablo BianchiGlutanimateGlutanimate

I have looked high and low for text to speech for Ubuntu that is high quality. There is none. My vocal cords are paralyzed so I needed TTS to add voice instructions to my Ubuntu videos. You can get commercial high quality Linux text to speech software here. It's just really expensive. I ended up buying Natural Reader for Windows (doesn't work in Ubuntu under Wine) for $40. Maybe later I will get the Linux one.

Pablo Bianchi

I have been conducting research on the best sounding and easily tuned text to speech voices. Below is a listing of what I thought were the top 5 products in order of sound quality. Most of the websites associated with these product have an interactive demo that will allow for you to make your own determination.

1. NeoSpeech
2. iVona
3. Acapela
4. AT&T Natural voices
5. CereProc Voices

I find Nitech HTS voices on festival very natural and comforting over any other voices I have heard. See this link on how to set up Nitech and other sounds with festival. I have not found a good gui which I can use to configure those voices but setting them via festival.scm still works. That post is very old and you might want to find the actual installation directory using 'locate festival' command

Combine SVOX tools (pico) with LibreOffice:

SVOX (pico) tools are easy to install and brings good quality voices in Ubuntu. Install it:

You can use LibreOffice in combination with SVOX (pico) tools by install the 'Read Text' extension and you obtain a 'GUI' for this excellent TTS software:

Set up Read Text Extension's options with Tools - Add-ons - Read selection.... Use /usr/bin/python as the external program. Select a command line option that includes the token (PICO_READ_TEXT_PY), you may want to experiment some of them.

Now you only have to select some text in LO Writer, Calc, Impress or Draw and clic on the icon added as a tool bar (a happy face with a ballon).

Here is what I did to have pure natural speech for pdf and other text files(other solutions are not natural or they're just paid services). This is actually a work around using chromium or chrome but works fast and easy.

1. Install SpeakIt! extension on your chrome or chromium.
2. Install PDF Viewer if you're using chromium(chrome already has a pdf viewer for free) and check 'Allow in incognito' and 'Allow access to file URLs' options in extensions settings of chromium.
3. Drag and drop your pdf to browser.
4. Now highlight some text and right click and select SpeakIt! so you can listen to pure natural text-to-speech.

There's also ways to open other files like .doc and .txt in chrome and do the same. There's other extensions for chrome that view pdf files, check if it fits you better. Besides you can upload all kind of texts in Google Drive and use SpeakIt! to read it for you.Another extension called 'Speak text' works the same way and has natural speech.

When searching for a better tts engine to use with the new firefox 49 narrative mode I found pico tts (svox) - my favorite TTS engine.

How to change the default speech synthesis engine system wide?

People at arch linux brought me to the right path:

Uncomment the module you like and make it default in speech-dispatcher settings:

Restart the daemon:

BUT, when starting firefox again, nothing happens. According to the link above (arch forum post #10 and #16) works with festival (did not try), but the speech-dispatcher for pico does not list available voices. It won't run.

Any idea out there would be highly appreciated ;-)

Pablo Bianchi

My favorite text-to-speech program is called Magic English, but like Natural Reader mentioned by Joe Steiger, it is a Windows program and I'm not sure if it will run under Wine.

AT&T Natural Voices is available online as a demo, but that's more of a work-around than a solution...

Chris GrangerChris Granger

For that I build Intelligent Speaker - extension for Google Chrome. It can read pages even without selection (when text detention is correct).

Vitaly ZdanevichVitaly Zdanevich

Simple Google™ TTS

Pico, mbrola, cmu, festival, flite, all SUCK in 2017 (They were amazing in the 90s). AT&T natural speech (which is fantastic) isn't linux compat and it's not free, therefore we use Google

Pablo BianchiJonathanJonathan

gTTS

gTTS (Google Text-to-Speech), a Python library and CLI tool to interface with Google Translate's text-to-speech API. Writes spoken mp3 data to a file, a file-like object (bytestring) for further audio manipulation, or stdout.

Cons: CLI-only. Need to be online as it requires to request to Google public open endpoint.

Usage

Others

Natural Reader Install Voices download free, software Programs Online Game

^{Some were already mentioned}

• Mimic. Installation:

• eSpeak + Gespeaker (GUI) (Gespeaker source code)

  Cons: Old and ugly

• Firefox
• Chrome

Pablo BianchiPablo Bianchi

protected by Community♦Mar 5 '16 at 3:18

Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).
Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged software-recommendationtext-to-speech or ask your own question.

Natural Reader Install Voices download free, software Programs Online Without

What do you need to know about free software?