5 Installation Instructions ¶

This chapter gives brief and detailed installation instructions for configuring, installing and starting Emacspeak.

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5.1 Obtaining Emacspeak ¶

Emacspeak is available on the Internet at:

WWW: http://emacspeak.sf.net
WWW: https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak
Mail List: emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu
List Request: emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu

The Emacspeak mailing list is maintained by Greg E. Priest-Dorman. If you are using Emacspeak, you should join the list by sending mail to the request address.

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5.2 Quick Installation ¶

Here are the quick installation instructions. See the next section for detailed installation instructions.

Packages for Linux distributions such as Debian typically become available on the WWW a few weeks or months after a new version is released. The instructions below are for building and installing Emacspeak from the source distribution. If you install one of the pre-packaged distributions, use the install instructions that come with that package.

Obtain the source code — either by downloading the tar.bz2 file for the latest release — or by cloning the git repository. ‘git clone https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak’
Change to the emacspeak directory. Type ‘make config’ to configure the sources.
Type
```
make
```
to compile the files.
Next, decide which text-to-speech engine you will be using, and proceed to install that engine. Your choices are:
- Open Source ESpeak on Linux. Install the ESpeak packages for your system, then compile the Emacspeak ESpeak server by doing:
```
cd servers/native-espeak; make
```
- ViaVoice Outloud (AKA Eloquent). You need to purchase this engine from the voxin.org site. That purchase will give you install-ready packages for installing the speech engine as well as Emacspeak.
- On the Mac, you can use the builtin Mac TTS engine — emacspeak comes with a speech server for that TTS engine written in Python.
Having installed and configured the TTS engine of your choice, and having built the associated speech server, set Emacspeak up to use that engine by setting environment variable DTK_PROGRAM. If using Bash as your shell, add the line
```
export DTK_PROGRAM=<engine-name>
```
to your .bash_profile. As an example, to use ESpeak, add
```
export DTK_PROGRAM=espeak
```
Run it by doing
- Add the line
```
(load-file "<emacspeak-dir>/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
```
  to the top of your .emacs file.
In the above, <emacspeak-dir> refers to the directory where you unpacked the sources.

See the next section for details on building and testing the speech server.

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5.3 Building And Testing The Speech Server ¶

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5.3.1 Speech Servers ¶

Speech servers are located in the emacspeak/servers directory.

ESpeak: servers/espeak. This is a TCL script that uses a library built in servers/native-espeak/.
Dectalk: servers/dtk-exp. This is a TCL script that does not depend on any native code.
Outloud: servers/outloud or servres/32-outloud (for 64-bit machines). This is a TCL script that uses the library built in servers/linux-outloud. Note that a checkout from GitHub gives you a prebuilt library — however you will need to purchase the TTS engine from http://voxin.org.
Mac: servers/mac. This is a Python script that binds to the native Mac TTS.

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5.3.1.1 Testing The Selected Server. ¶

Once you have picked the TTS engine to use, run the selected server script at a shell prompt, e.g. for the espeak engine, do:

./servers/espeak

This will result in a TCL prompt. Here, you can test the TTS engine by:

```
q "this is a test."
d
```
You should hear the TTS engine speak the text.
‘s’ The above command stops speech. You should see a TCL prompt when you execute it.

Quit this TCL session by typing C-D.

5.1 Obtaining Emacspeak
5.2 Quick Installation		Default installation and startup.
5.3 Building And Testing The Speech Server