Emacspeak


Emacspeak is a free computer application, a speech interface, and an audio desktop. It employs Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and Tcl. Developed principally by T. V. Raman, it was first released in April 1995. It is portable to all POSIX-compatible OSs. It is tightly integrated with Emacs, allowing it to render intelligible and useful content rather than parsing the graphics ; its default voice synthesizer can be replaced with other software synthesizers when a server module is installed. Emacspeak is one of the most popular speech interfaces for Linux, bundled with most major distributions. The following article is written on 20th anniversary of Emacspeak
Emacspeak achieves its integration by being written largely in Emacs Lisp using "advice", enabling it to literally be a wrapper around most functions that change or otherwise modify the display. Auditorily, verbalizations are pre-emptible, and common actions like opening a menu or closing a file have a brief sound associated with that particular action; it also immediately verbalizes all insertions of characters, and attempts to speak as much of the context sentences around the cursor's present location as possible.
Emacspeak facilitates access to a wide variety of content, from the web to DAISY books.
On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian Museum's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Version naming

As of January 24, 2019, Emacspeak is at version 49. Each release was codenamed after a dog.