EFlite is a speech server for Emacspeak and other screen readers that allows them to interface with Festival Lite, a free text-to-speech engine developed at the CMU Speech Center as an off-shoot of Festival. EFlite is still in beta, but I have been using it successfully with Yasr to get speech on my notebook under Linux without having to lug my Speak-out around. It uses Festival Lite's code to interface with the sound driver. As of v0.4.0, eflite can be used with ALSA as well as the older OSS. Flite 1.3 does not include working ALSA support, but there is a patch made by Lukas Loehrer that adds ALSA support. You will need to build this patch into flite in order to use ALSA with eflite.

You can download the latest version (v0.4.1, dated Jan. 18, 2006) here. You can also check out the newest revision from CVS by setting your CVSROOT to :pserver:anonymous@eflite.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/eflite and checking out the eflite module.

EFlite is now part of Debian GNU/Linux, thanks to Mario Lang.

I have made up a patch to FLite 1.1 to fix a bug that could cause a crash if it is unable to open the audio driver.

If you have any comments, then feel free to email me.

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