Imagine a small voice synthesizer on your computer. eSpeak NG is basically that. eSpeak NG is derived from the original eSpeak project, with the “NG” standing for community-driven efforts to enhance and expand its functionality. eSpeak NG is a small, open-source program that converts text to spoken word in a variety of languages and accents.
eSpeak NG takes a different approach from the more complex text-to-speech systems, which rely on large databases of recorded human voices. It understands the rules of each language’s pronunciation and constructs sounds from the basic phonetic units. This makes it very lightweight and portable!