iEntry 10th Anniversary
LinuxHaxor
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MHMake Your Linux Talk With TTS
People with disability who relied on built-in TTS (text to speech) application in OSX or Vista will be disappointed with the fact that most popular Linux distributions does not have any TTS applications installed by default. While researching for a friend in need, I bumped in to Festival, the de-facto TTS project for Linux Systems. Fedora and Debian based distro users can install festival or flite package from their respective package manager. These are both CLI apps.
For a more practical usage via a proper UI, you can check out KDE Accessibility package which comes with KTTSmgr a front-end GUI manager for festival with very extensive options and kmouth a GUI for text to speech.
KTTS Manager
I probably would have never known about the state of TTS application for Linux if I didn’t have to research for a disable friend and I was a bit surprised to learn that it doesn’t come installed by default. Do any of you rely on any accessibility application on Linux systems? If so, how would you compare it with OSX and Vista Accessibility options?
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Unfortunately Linux accessibility options and tools are as good as both OSX and vista option. Festival TTS you mentioned here (perhaps the only Linux option AFAIK) is no where close to being as good as the default option for Vista and OSX and I am not even talking about countless free and commercial application available for those platforms that are even better
Gnome has accessibility things too, and I think Orca is the name of the screenreader.
KTTS and KMouth can be configured to use the Festival TTS synthesizer. And if you do a little Google searching, you can find voices for Festival that the equal of, if not better than the free voices for Windows. The highest grade voices for any of the platforms are commercial voices and will cost you some $$.
There is a great tutorial for finding and using better quality voices for the Festival system on the Tutorials and Tips section of ubuntuforums.org. I have used the information in that tutorial to set up high quality TTS on a wide variety of distributions — *buntus, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora. I use these distributions in VMWare and VirtualBox virtual machines so that they can be installed on a variety of OS platforms to provide text-to-speech capability for individuals who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological disorders — strokes, neuromuscular diseases, neurological injury, etc.
I’ve been looking everywhere for a TTS
I’m totally installing it today
with KDE you are able to configure all od your events with speech too.
you only have to activate it with the events configuration in controlcenter
btw.: if you own a recent Garmin navi which is able to say streetnames:
take a look into the data on your Garmin or SDCard – the Voices are TTS
i only knew Festival because the Pidgin plugin – no idea about Flite – tested it and enjoyed a lot! thanks! :)
kabini üretimini saglam üretim ve kalitede birleştiriyoruz.
Text to speech for Windows is far, far better than that available for Linux, and of course far easier to set up. The trick is that voices require a lot of work to make, and the good ones all cost money. Still, for less than $100 you can get an excellent program to read any standard text (some other formats supported as well) from http://www.nextup.com. I recommend the voice Samantha, or Crystal, or Heather. My latest and current favorite is Serena, with a very cool British accent.
You need to buy the program TextAloud from the site, then but a great voice. The user forums there are excellent and will give you guidance on which voice to buy.
I also bought a voice for my Linux computer, and it just wasn’t the same, nowhere near as good. I have also tried many free voices on Linux computers, and can’t stand any of them.
Apple supposedly also has some great voices. I haven’t tried them.
never heard about ORCA? is standard in GNOME distros ‘bro! ubu-debian too.
I have a little script I run with a keyboard shortcut.
xterm -geometry 90×30 -e ‘xclip -o | sed “s/\\\u[0-9][0-9][0-9]*//g” ; xclip -o | sed “s/\\\u[0-9][0-9][0-9]*//g” | festival –tts’
Still just runs festival but now all I have to do is select text and hit my shortcut. It’s great for multi-tasking.
To use it you just need festival and xclip.
only knew Festival because the Pidgin plugin
I use festival over ssh to tell my wife to make me a sandwich. Very useful tool
I tried festival, but sound quality is too bad. I used Opera Speak, that have very good sound quality in windows, most of the web pages i visit, i use the speak feature to read. Switch to ubuntu, i miss that feature a lot. Is there any good quality voice for festival ?