Conversion Tools: Speech to Text

EARS

EARS: An attempt to gather existing free code for speech recognition into a usable tool
platform: Linux

Emacspeak

Emacspeak: A Speech Output Subsystem For Emacs
platform: Linux

Screader

Screader: A screen reader using software or hardware speech synthesizer
platform: Linux

ACCESS HOWTO: "3.2.2. Speech Synthesis

Speech Synthesisers take (normally) ASCII text and convert it into actual spoken output. It is possible to have these implemented as either hardware or software. Unfortunately, the free Linux speech synthesisers are, reportedly, not good enough to use as a sole means of output.

Hardware speech synthesisers are the alternative. The main one that I know of that works is DECtalk from Digital, driven by emacspeak. However, at this time (March 1997) a driver for the Doubletalk synthesiser has been announced. Using emacspeak full access to all of the facilities of Linux is fairly easy. This includes the normal use of the shell, a world wide web browser and many other similar features, such as email. Although, it only acts as a plain text reader (similar to IBM's one for the PC) when controling programs it doesn't understand, with those that it does, it can provide much more sophisticated control. See section ``Emacspeak'' for more information about emacspeak."