text to speech in Linux

This video demonstrates the open source text-to-speech program known as festival. It's freely available and comes with most Linux distributions.

With my script and this program, you can make videos for you tube without any microphones or cameras.

On ew bun 2 all you need to do is install the festival package. Then then pipe text to the festival program with the --tts option. This will speak the text.

Once you've verified that it's working, you can use the text to wave program to output a wave file of the speech. I then used lame to make an mp3 out of the wave file. Then I used my make vid dot pie script with a picture, the mp3 file, and specified the length of time for the video.

You can do it. It's easy. Talk to you later people. Peace out.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• linux
• text
• to
• speech
• festival
• lame
• python
• howto

[mcstikkel]

LOL THE CAKE IS A LIE!!!

[F5overlord]

its glados...

[worldlearner0411]

I would complain that its impossible to understand clearly....not really applicable, but I cannot even imagine how difficult it would be to write a tts program.

[surfstev]

I just got Readplease, a full featured Windows XP text to speech program, to work in Linux Mint 11 after installing the program WINE. Next I downloaded Readplease and ran the file through WINE. It installed a Readplease icon on my desktop. I dragged and dropped it onto the task bar and it launches Readplease with a single click. After experimenting I discovered if you paste and copy your data into LiberOffice Writer first that Readplease reads it perfectly.

[purplemutantas]

I just added a video response with nicer voices for festival. In the description of the video is a link to an Ubuntu tutorial on how to install the nicer voices.

[purplemutantas]

There are MUCH better voices for festival. There is some info on the Ubuntu forums on how to install the better voices. My favorite is one of the female voices developed in Japan. I will see what I need to do to record the voice. Then I will post the video as a reply. I may see about doing a demo of a few of the voices I have installed.

[mindw99]

The quality is stell poor.

For real applications Natural Voices from AT&T is the best. And now there is a (development) version for linux available.

[lanswipe]

how do i get that female portal voice for festival?

[supergenius1994]

anyone know where you can get a c++ text to speech library?

[schmidtbag]

espeak sucks if you don't configure it. as far as i'm aware, you have to pay for palsite. i agree, it is pretty good and is better than espeak, but espeak is better than this

[realthor21]

c'mon, this is closer to PalSite's Avatars than espeak. I tried espeak and it really sucked.

[schmidtbag]

espeak sounds much better. unless festival uses espeak (which it really does not seem like), this was not as understandable, and espeak is for linux and free. festival is still nice for something free, though