hebrew text to speech

[Geoff Shang]

On Mon, 2 Nov 2009, Itay Donenhirsch wrote:

> i know of espeak, is there any option to make it talk in hebrew?

Not yet.

I wrote to the developer of Espeak to ask him about the possibility.

The problem is of course that written Hebrew does not include many of the 
vowel sounds, which means that a text-to-speech engine needs to either 
make educated guesses about which sounds to insert when, or have a big 
word dictionary ... or both.

I did a bit of digging around for research materials which might be use to 
develop a text-to-phoneme translator for use with Espeak, but my ability 
to do this is somewhat limited by the fact that I do not speak much Hebrew 
myself, and being Blind I am not able to read any Hebrew with any of the 
text-to-speech solutions that I have.  So my searching has been limited to 
english-language pages.

I wrote to Jonathan a couple of years back.  I don't know if he's done any 
work on it since, I suspect not.

There would be considerable interest in Espeak being able to speak Hebrew, 
not only from the Linux community but from the blind community as a whole, 
since Windows solutions are quite expensive and it would be good to have a 
free option.

Geoff.