It should be possible to use eSpeak as a front-end to mbrola. eSpeak does the spelling-to-phoneme translation and intonation, and mbrola produces the speech. I've tried this with the mbrola "en1" voice and it sounds good. The speech quality is better than eSpeak, and the intonation is better festival etc. Response times are probably slower than standard eSpeak. I have now added some mbrola support to eSpeak, version 1.21.05 or later, from http://espeak.sf.net/test/latest.html . This now includes a command-line version of the espeak.exe program (which doesn't yet include a sound-interface). If you do the command: espeak -v en --mbrola=en1 "some text" then it produces mbrola .pho data to stdout. On Linux, you can simply pipe that into mbrola, eg: espeak -v en --mbrola=en1 -f textfile | mbrola /usr/share/mbrola/en1 - test.wav or to play the sound immediately, pipe the output from mbrola to a sound player, eg: espeak -v en --mbrola=en1 -f textfile | mbrola /usr/share/mbrola/en1 - - | aplay -r16000 -fS16 eSpeak needs data to translate from its own phoneme names to the mbrola phoneme names. So far, I've only set up data for mbrola voices: en1, us1, us2, us3, ro1. I don't know how to use mbrola from a Windows SAPI5 speech synthesizer, but it looks like the information is available. I don't have time to work on it just now though.