up vote 11 down vote favorite
4
share [g+] share [fb]

Is there an equivalent to the Mac's terminal command "say" in Ubuntu 9.10?

link|improve this question
77% accept rate
As an aside: a nice list of English sentences in which Mac OS X understands the context quite well, like "My name is Dr. Smith and I live on Smith Dr.", "The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert", "The guard will permit you to pass if you show a valid permit" and "It is much rainier on the slopes of Mt. Rainier" at macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=view&cid=107211 – Arjan Jan 10 '10 at 10:36
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

espeak should be installed by default as text-to-speech engine on Linux.

You should be able to get it to speak from command-line by doing something like this:

echo "Text to speak"|espeak

You can also start espeak by just entering espeak itself, and then enter each line of text you want spoken followed by enter.

Other TTS engines for Linux you could look at:

Espeak is available at (but should be installed by default!):

link|improve this answer
1  
If you wanted this to directly replace the say command you could use a function: function say() { echo "@" | espeak ; } – Bostonvaulter Jul 29 '10 at 4:25
feedback
up vote 4 down vote

There are a number of speech synthesizers available to install in karmic, most of the ones I've tried have a console version.

Search for "Speech" in synaptic to get the full list. The espeak package works like say.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.