espeak command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix espeak command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

espeak: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: espeak: command not found

Solutions to espeak: command not found

How To Fix espeak: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu espeak is provided by espeak package.

espeak is:

eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and some other languages.

eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source text to speech (TTS) engines, and sounds quite different. It’s perhaps not as natural or “smooth”, but some find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods.

It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin.

  • Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
  • Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
  • Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
  • Potential for other languages. More than 40 languages are included.
  • Compact size. The program and its data total about 350 kbytes.
  • Written in C++.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install espeak

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install espeak.

sudo apt -y install espeak

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install espeak

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix espeak command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.