The main changes are fixing a crash bug and… internationalization support. So, if you like this project but you’re not a coder, now you’ve got a way to contribute: translating it into your language (come on, it only has a few strings! :)).

The new version is already in my PPA: espeak-gui_0.2-0ubuntu1~ppa1_all.deb. A tarball is also available, and the installation instructions are the following:

$ wget -c http://launchpad.net/espeak-gui/trunk/0.2/+download/espeak-gui-0.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf espeak-gui-0.2.tar.gz; cd espeak-gui-0.2
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

In case you didn’t already have the previous version, you’ll also need to install the python-espeak module, for which there are also .deb’s (i386, amd64) or the manual installation option like explained in my previous post:

$ bzr get lp:python-espeak
$ cd python-espeak
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

Here are the contents of the NEWS file:

2010-01-02: Version 0.2
-----------------------

 - Fixed a crash happening when there was no voice language set in
   gconf (LP: 502253). [Reported by Rugby471]
 - Added a "Plain text" filter to the Open/Save dialogues.
 - Added internationalization support.
 - Added a manpage and a gconf schemas file.
 - A couple little user interface improvements.

Translations: Catalan.

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Why, when, who?

The project started almost a year ago when, out of curiosity on what writing Python bindings for C/C++ libraries is like, I started python-espeak, bindings for the espeak speech synthesizer (which, by the way, comes installed by default on Ubuntu and many other distributions).

It turned out that writing bindings isn’t as funny as I thought so they haven’t advanced much since then, but the basic functionality was there and I felt the need for some application using those bindings, so that’s how I started espeak-gui.

Some months later, in true Free Software spirit, someone else -interested in an application like this for personal usage- found my code on Launchpad and got in touch with me, providing me with quite some nice patches. Thank you, Joe Burmeister! However, I didn’t do any more work on it, as I’ve been busy with other projects (eg. Zeitgeist), and development stalled there.

Now, another half a year later, I’ve finally got back to this and decided it’s time I push it out into the wild. So, after cleaning it up a bit more and implementing some new feature, here you have espeak-gui!

(The bindings aren’t really encouraged for widespread usage at this point and I’ll probably end up rewriting them using SWIG or something else; however, if you’re interested in using them please get in touch with me).

Where do I get it?

If you’re using Ubuntu or Debian, you can find a packages for python-espeak and espeak-gui in my PPA.

For users of other distributions, you can install them manually after installing the needed dependencies (most importantly, libespeak-dev).

For the Python bindings for espeak:

$ bzr get lp:python-espeak
$ cd python-espeak
$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

And for the GUI:

$ wget -c http://launchpad.net/espeak-gui/trunk/0.1/+download/espeak-gui-0.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf espeak-gui-0.1.tar.gz
$ cd espeak-gui-0.1
# python setup.py install

[Update: A new version is out, see espeak-gui 0.2 for details.]

I have several ideas on how to continue improving it and I think I’ll slowly continue doing so (or maybe not so slowly if I get positive feedback on this :)). Also, patches are always welcome!

Using it

Once installed, you’ll find espeak-gui under Applications -> Sound and Video (maybe Accessibility would be a better place?), or you can run it from the command line like this:

espeak [ <file 1> <file 2> ... ]

Related posts:

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2. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2′s API So now that Zeitgeist 0.2.0 is out I’ve thought I’d...