It sports a text to speech API, among others, and a command interface for extensions. The system supports English (both Brithsh and American) as well as Welsh and Spanish. You can also find packages for Finnish, Polish and Russian to name a few. And if that wasn't enough the whole lot of it is published under the BSD license - meaning it's free and open source.
To get started we'll need a few packages: Obviously first we'll need festival and xsel.
cat << eof > talk.sh
#!/bin/bash
xsel | festival --tts --pipe
eof
cmod +x ~/tts.sh
Next bind mod4+z to ~/talk.sh. From Ubuntu key bindings are found under System, Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts
If you run into the error Linux: can't open /dev/dsp
echo "
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
" >> ~/.festivalrc
The speech rate can be configured in /usr/share/festival/voices/english/kal_diphone/festvox/kal_diphone.scm
under the setting "Parameter.set 'Duration_Stretch" -- the lower the value the faster the speech rate.
Hi, just a note:
if you are using, as I am, spanish or other non-ascii characters, just use:
xsel | iconv -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 | festival –tts –pipe
or
echo “Para español, pulse uno” | iconv -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 | festival –tts –pipe
hope it helps
Awesome tip, I’m going to set this up when I get home from work.
Hi all,
Nice article. hought i’d give it a try. just a note, should it now be
chmod +x ~/talk.sh
rather than cmod +x ~/tts.sh?
Great site – much love and goodnight!
I am not able to get it to work on BT5. I keep getting
Linux: can’t open /dev/dsp
When I tried to install festival it said it was already installed. Not sure what to do next since I am fairly new to linux
Here are the errors I get after using the code that I missed in the printed portion of this page. What can I do from this point?
root@bt:~# echo ”
> (Parameter.set ‘Audio_Command “aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE”)
> (Parameter.set ‘Audio_Method ‘Audio_Command)
> “>>~/.festivalrc
root@bt:~# festival
SIOD ERROR: unbound variable : aplay
closing a file left open: /root/.festivalrc
closing a file left open: /usr/share/festival/init.scm
festival: fatal error exiting.
printf “;use ALSA\n(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Method ‘Audio_Command)\n(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Command \”aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r \$SR \$FILE\”)\n” > ~/.festivalrc
Ok, I got it to work using the code above…I think the forward slash was misssing in the code on this page…or I did something else wrong…but the above code worked so I can move forward..thanks guys.
I got the commands from: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1190751
Ok new prob when creating the shortcut. I am using backtrack so the default user is root. I am trying to set the shortcut but I am not sure what to put in the command field. I tried /root/talk.sh and other variations but no luck here is how my files look:
root@bt:~# ls
Desktop Downloads talk.sh test2
root@bt:~#
What else can I try?