The eSpeak-NG speech synthesis engine on Chrome OS

Chrome OS comes with a port of the open-source eSpeak-NG speech synthesis engine. eSpeak-NG is lower quality than Google‘s “PATTS” speech engine, but it’s faster, uses less resouces, and supports more languages.

Read more about Text-to-Speech in Chrome.

See also Google's “PATTS” speech engine.

About eSpeak-NG

eSpeak-NG is an open-source project, released under the GPL v3 license. The current home of the project is on GitHub:

https://github.com/espeak-ng

NG stands for Next Generation. It's a fork of the eSpeak engine created by Jonathan Duddington.

Eitan Isaacson of Mozilla wrote the initial port of eSpeak to JavaScript using emscripten in April 2015. Alberto Pettarin adapted that to work with eSpeak-NG in October 2016.

The Chrome OS port is heavily based on the emscripten port, but targets WebAssembly instead of asm.js, and uses a completely rewritten JavaScript glue layer that implements Chrome's TTS Engine Extension API and outputs audio using an AudioWorklet from the Web Audio API.

Why we include eSpeak-NG in Chrome OS

There are two reasons we include eSpeak-NG in Chrome OS:

  1. To maximize our language coverage for text-to-speech and ensure that Chrome OS is accessible to as many users as possible out of the box.
  2. As a secondary goal, to provide an alternative speech engine for screen reader users that's maximally responsive and works at the highest rates of speed.

Building from source

The source code to the Chrome OS port of eSpeak-NG can be found here:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/espeak-ng

All of the Chrome-specific changes are in the “chrome” branch. Clone the repository, switch to the “chrome” branch, and check out README.chrome for build instructions.

Releasing a new version of eSpeak for Chrome OS

First, you should push any changes to the git repository: (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/espeak-ng).

As eSpeak-NG is licensed under the GPL, Chrome OS should never include any changes to this project that haven't been committed to the Git repository first. Make sure that the chrome-extension directory is complete and ready to use as-is; in particular if changes were made to the native code, be sure to fully compile using emscripten and copy and generated wasm files to the chrome-extension/js directory.

Remember, all of the build instructions are in README.chrome in the “chrome” branch. To test, open chrome://extensions in Chrome, enable Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and point it to the espeak-ng/chrome-extension directory.

To update the package on Chrome OS, first export a tarball by running this from inside the espeak-ng directory:

git archive chrome --prefix=espeak-ng/ | gzip > espeak-ng-1.49.3.2.tar.gz

Version number: the first three components (1.49.3 in the example above) should match the eSpeak-NG version in CHANGELOG.md, and the fourth component should be incremented with each new release of the Chrome OS port for that version.

Next, upload this file to chromeos-localmirror/distfiles and make it world-readable (Googlers only):

  1. Visit https://pantheon.corp.google.com/storage/browser/chromeos-localmirror/distfiles/?pli=1
  2. Click “Upload files” and select your tarball
  3. Select the uploaded file, and from the More menu, choose “Edit permissions”
  4. Click Add item, then enter User -> allUsers -> Reader
  5. Save

The next steps require that you have the full Chrome OS source code checked out and you're in your chroot. See the Chromium OS Developer Guide for instructions:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/developer_guide.md

espeak-ng is in this directory:

src/third_party/chromiumos-overlay/app-accessibility/espeak-ng

Rename the ebuild to match the version number of the tarball you uploaded. The version number must match exactly! Then, add the new renamed file to git. For example:

mv espeak-ng-1.49.3.1.ebuild espeak-ng-1.49.3.2.ebuild
git add espeak-ng-1.49.3.2.ebuild

Next, rebuild the manifest:

ebuild espeak-ng-1.49.3.2.ebuild manifest

To test it, use emerge to rebuild this package, and cros deploy to deploy that package to an attached Chrome OS device, for example:

emerge-${BOARD} espeak-ng
cros deploy CHROMEBOOK_IP_ADDRESS espeak-ng

To upload the change for review, use ‘repo start’ to start making changes in this package, then commit the change to git, ensuring that you're changing both the ebuild and manifest file and adding appropriate BUG= and TEST= lines, then use ‘repo upload’ to upload the change for review.

Running on Chrome OS on Desktop Linux

See Chromevox on Desktop Linux for more how to use eSpeak's speech engine on Chrome OS emulated on desktop Linux.