How to get espeak working?

Question

I'm trying read it loud feature of acrobat, so need a text synthesizer, I've installed espeak and libgnome-speech libraries (it didn't work for acrobat right out of the box) so when I started espeak-gui through command line it gave me segmentation fault next I tried only espeak and here is output:

    ALSA lib pcm.c:2212:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.rear
ALSA lib pcm.c:2212:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.center_lfe
ALSA lib pcm.c:2212:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.side
ALSA lib audio/pcm_bluetooth.c:1613:(audioservice_expect) BT_GET_CAPABILITIES failed : Input/output error(5)
ALSA lib audio/pcm_bluetooth.c:1613:(audioservice_expect) BT_GET_CAPABILITIES failed : Input/output error(5)
ALSA lib audio/pcm_bluetooth.c:1613:(audioservice_expect) BT_GET_CAPABILITIES failed : Input/output error(5)
ALSA lib audio/pcm_bluetooth.c:1613:(audioservice_expect) BT_GET_CAPABILITIES failed : Input/output error(5)
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:957:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only playback stream
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started

Any ideas? or any alternative solutions for read it loud?

Thanks

Solution 1

Please, run this test on the command line (AKA, terminal):

espeak "Hello, I am Espeak, the voice synthesizer" --stdout | paplay

That should work, but if you want the Linux voice synthesizer to read your text out loud, you should run and enable Orca (the GNOME default screen reader). It work with Evince, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.

Solution 2

That is the output from when I write "espeak hello" as well (and it does in fact say "hello" to me), so the output itself does not look like the program fails.

Could you please post the output of:

espeak hello
echo $?

That will give the exit code from the espeak program. Then we can tell if the espeak program thought everything went fine (usually return code 0) or if it considers itself to have failed.

Solution 3

It looks like this error is caused by espeak trying to use alsa by default when Ubuntu is running pulseaudio - I get this error myself on my laptop, but not on my desktop. Piping the output of espeak to pulseaudio (--stdout | paplay) as suggested avoids this error message and the associated delay - I suppose another solution would be to configure espeak to use pulseaudio instead of alsa - I assume it is set this way because not all distros use pulseaudio yet?

Comments

[Drew Noakes]

I am seeing the same error as the OP and the exit code is zero. Doesn't look like that will help much unfortunately.