Speech engine

zowki · 2009-10-03 19:56:11

Are there any good text to speech engines for Linux? I want to use it to make a welcome message when I log in. Like in those futuristic movies where computers greet their masters.

Knute · 2009-10-03 23:17:43

There are quite a few out there. It all depends on what you are meaning by good.

Festival has LOTS of options, but is kind of complicated to set up.

There are some more lightweight engines out there like flite, and espeak which may be more of what you are looking for.

espeak can be used with espeak <phrase you want it to say>.
flite by default uses files, so if you had a text file and wanted it read to you flite <filename would do it. If you use flite -t "<text>" it will speak the text.

Since both try to be lightweight, they have more limited features than festival, but they do have a few various voices available.

There are others if you search, but those are the ones that I've used.

Last edited by Knute (2009-10-03 23:18:25)

zowki · 2009-10-04 05:42:38

Thanks for the suggestions. Festival seems too advanced for my purposes. I gave espeak and flite a try and they both work. But how do I change the default voice? Or does it only come with one voice? I want a voice similair to the woman in the sample sounds in "/usr/share/sounds/alsa".

Knute · 2009-10-04 13:13:36

As I said, they have limited voices available.

espeak will list the voices available with espeak --voices=language. The voices are in /usr/share/espeak-data/voices.

Apparently flite has options to compile other voices in, but I've never really explored that option to much.

graysky · 2009-10-04 13:33:10

festival is pretty easy to use actually... did you see the wiki page?

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-03 19:56:11

Speech engine

#2 2009-10-03 23:17:43

Re: Speech engine

#3 2009-10-04 05:42:38

Re: Speech engine

#4 2009-10-04 13:13:36

Re: Speech engine

#5 2009-10-04 13:33:10

Re: Speech engine

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