README

Ekho is a text-to-speech engine. It is part of eGuideDog project, which develops free software for the blind.

Currently, it can speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, Tibetan, Ngangien and English (through Festival). Korean is in trial.

Author: Cameron Wong (hgneng at gmail.com), https://eguidedog.net

Special thanks to Silas S. Brown (http://ssb22.user.srcf.net/) for his great contribution to Mandarin and Korean support of Ekho!

Many thanks to Yali Cheng for contributing a Mandarin voice, Liao Weicheng for contributing Hakka voice, Hae-Sung Jeon (https://www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/hae-sung_jeon.php) for contributing a Korean voice, Trinley Pedron and Tennom YK for contributing Tibetan voice and Zhao Qianshan for contributing Ngangien voice!

For LICENSE information of Ekho, please refer to the file COPYING.

===== How to run (for Linux) =====
$ ekho "Chinese UTF-8 text" # The default language is Mandarin
$ ekho -v Mandarin "speak in Mandarin"
$ ekho -v Cantonese "speak in Cantonese"
$ ekho -t ogg -o output.ogg "123" # -o means output to file, -t specifies the type (wav or ogg)

To read how to install the software, please refer file INSTALL.

===== Known issues =====
Festival is not thread safe. Ekho run in multi-threads. setVoice can only be called once if Festival is enabled.