espeakup8

Usage

Options

-P path, --pid-path=path

Set the full path for the pid file espeakup uses when in daemon mode.

--alsa-volume

Drive the ALSA volume. useful for live environments where volume adjustments maybe impossible.

-V voicename, --default-voice=voicename

Set the espeak-ng voice to be used by default.

-d, --debug

run in the foreground, rather than becoming a daemon process.

-h, --help

display a brief help message and exit.

-v, --version

output version information and exit.

Overview

espeakup bridges the gap between two tools: the Speakup screen review system and the espeak-ng text-to-speech engine. Each of these tools performs a well-defined task.

Speakup is a kernel-based screen reader for the Linux console. It extracts and processes the text that is displayed on the foreground virtual console. It supports several hardware based speech synthesizers directly. However, since it is in kernel space, it cannot support a software speech synthesizer directly since these are in user space.

espeak-ng is a popular software speech synthesizer. It is small, light weight, very responsive, and supports multiple languages. espeakup is a connector which will read text sent to it by speakup and forward it to espeak-ng. This allows Speakup to use espeak-ng as its speech synthesizer.

espeakup is a daemon. Typically, it is started at boot time, and it terminates when the system is halted or rebooted. It should be started by the system's init scripts. This process varies among Linux distributions, but the details are usually managed by the person who packaged espeakup for your distribution. From the perspective of an average user, espeakup's operation is invisible.