MULTISPEECH(1)

💖 MULTISPEECH — the multilingual speech server, bestie 💖

okay so literally, the manual name is multispeech(1) and it lives in the General Commands Manual, but that's just the boring paperwork part. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

multispeech [options]

that's it. that's the whole summoning ritual. she takes options and she goes 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea, bestie: multispeech was primarily designed as a multilingual speech server for emacspeak — like, that's her origin story, that's her main character era. but she's not a one-trick pony 🦋 she can also be genuinely useful in some other circumstances too, whenever you need multilingual speech feedback in your life.

what does she actually do? she produces audible speech, sounds and tone signals according to the commands passed by her client. she's the vibe translator. and for the actual TTS transformation — the real text-to-speech heavy lifting — she utilizes third party speech synthesis software. she's not doing that alone, she's collaborating, she's networking, she's got a whole team 🫶

and the way that all aspects of multispeech behaviour are highly customizable via configuration files:

• /etc/multispeech.conf
• ~/.multispeechrc

like, everything. and if you wanna know the exact syntax, go read the multispeech.conf(5) man page, she explains it properly.

now the hierarchy, because this part MATTERS 👑

1. the user settings from ~/.multispeechrc always take precedence over the system-wide ones from /etc/multispeech.conf
2. and all of these settings in turn can be overridden by an extra configuration file specified via the command line

⚠️ some configuration options are mandatory, so at least one of these files must exist. no config, no service. periodt.

also: in case of errors or other important situations, multispeech sends messages to syslog using facility user. so if something's up, she's logging it. she's not being dramatic, she's being documented 💀

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

multispeech accepts the following options:

• -c, --config file — read configuration from specified file.
• -v, --verbose — print diagnostic messages on stderr. all diagnostic is logged via syslog and nothing is output on stderr or stdout by default.
• -d, --debug — allow some extra diagnostic info to be logged.
• -l, --list-devices — print list of all available audio output devices and exit.
• -h, --help — show summary of options and exit.
• -V, --version — show program version and exit.

🔥 tiny note: -v is lowercase and -V is uppercase and they do completely different things, so pls don't mix them up, i'm begging 🙈

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• /etc/multispeech.conf — provides system-wide configuration.
• ~/.multispeechrc — provides user configuration.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

espeak(1), freephone(1), mbrola(1), multispeech.conf(5), ru_tts(1), syslog.conf(5).

go read those too, they're the extended universe, iykyk ⭐

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Igor B. Poretsky <poretsky@mlbox.ru>. icon, legend, wrote the whole thing 💜

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and that's the page, bestie! this edition is dated January 6, 2009, and it's from the General Commands Manual, page MULTISPEECH(1) — she's been iconic since '09 and she's still serving 🦋✨ love that for her. bye pookie, go make some multilingual speech happen 💖