Female Robotic Text-To-Speech Tutorial

[wolterh]

Hi, I've been trying to get a robotic voice TTS to replace the default voice in espeak, which is boring and terrible.

I have achieved a female robotic voice, which I explain how to obtain here.

The tools used are

• espeak
• sox (play)

First, to "say" something with espeak, the TTS engine, you can use the following code:

echo "All systems online" | espeak

The voice the text is read with is the one we want to change. Specifically for the female robotic voice, we are going to use as base voice the female3 voice. We can set espeak to use it with the -v parameter, followed by the name of the voice: e.g.

echo "I sound like a female" | espeak -v female3

Now is when the robotic part comes in. Robotic voices are typically characterized by two things:

• Echo
• Metallic sound

These effects we can achieve with the sound manipulation application play, which is an interface to sox used solely for playing audio.
You can read the manual on sox

man sox

to understand the following code, which will transform normal computer voice into robotic-ish voice. You should read the espeak manual as well.


OBTAINING THE ROBOTIC VOICE
To get the robotic voice, follow these steps:

1. Save the following text in a text file (in this example, it will be referred to as femalebot:
   

   espeak --stdout -v female3 | play -t wav - \
   overdrive 10 \
   echo 0.8 0.8 5 0.7 \
   echo 0.8 0.7 6 0.7 \
   echo 0.8 0.7 10 0.7 \
   echo 0.8 0.7 12 0.7 \
   echo 0.8 0.88 12 0.7 \
   echo 0.8 0.88 30 0.7 \
   echo 0.6 0.6 60 0.7 \
   gain 8

   The metallic effect is achieved by using the echo effect with a very short delay. The overdrive enhances the sound a bit, and the other echo effects give the final kick to the robotic voice.
   
   
2. Now, set it to be executable with the chmod command, e.g.
   

   chmod +x /path/to/femalebot

3. You can now use the robot voice in TTS, by issuing the following command:
   

   echo "All systems online." | /absolute/path/to/femalebot

Additionally, and to make things easier, you can place the script in any directory in the PATH variable. This way, you can issue the last command as follows:

echo "All systems online." | femalebot

[coolglobal]

Sweet! Very sci-fi! Works as described. I'm going to have fun with this.

[Bandit]

Very nice.
I have been playing around with it every now and then for a month or two trying to get the female voice to sound more life like.

[Aquix]

Nice, tts is fun to play with. I'll test it this weekend.

Btw, it's called fembot ;P

[lovinglinux]

Cool. Now I can add voice to my scripts.

BTW, the sox script didn't work for me.

[tjeremiah]

ill give this a shot. I tried this on KDE because they have this feature where it can tell you the time, but I couldnt get it to sound normal.

[wolterh]

You can easily let it tell you the time by adding a cron job I did it myself, on an hourly basis.

However, I did some modifications to my script, I think it sounds a bit better:

espeak --stdout -v female3 | play -t wav - \
overdrive 10 \
echo 0.8 0.8 5 0.7 \
echo 0.8 0.7 6 0.7 \
echo 0.8 0.7 10 0.7 \
echo 0.8 0.7 12 0.7 \
echo 0.8 0.88 12 0.7 \
echo 0.8 0.88 30 0.7 \
echo 0.6 0.6 60 0.7 \
gain 8

Cool. Now I can add voice to my scripts.

BTW, the sox script didn't work for me.

Does it throw an error or something?

[uRock]

Moved to Tutorials & Tips. In the future please post your tutorials here and wait for them to be approved.

Thanks,
uRock

[Bandit]

Here is one I think is fairly good. Its less glass sounding then Wolis but will require some minor editing to one of the voices in the espeak shared data directory.

Editing the F5 voice in the voices/!v folder, copy and past this data over the existing voice info in that file:

language variant 
name female5 
gender female 

pitch 165 220
roughness 0

formant 0 105  80 150 
formant 1 110  80 160 
formant 2 110  70 150 
formant 3 110  70 150 
formant 4 115  80 200 
formant 5 115  80 100 
formant 6 110  70 150 
formant 7 110  70 100 
formant 8 110  70 150 

stressAdd 0 0 -10 -10 0 0 10 40 
breath 5 14  16   16   16   6  0 10 
echo 20 10 
voicing 75 
consonants 150 150
breathw 150 150 200 200 400 400

Then use this script to get the voice fine tuned a great deal:

espeak --stdout -s120 -k18 -a200 -v female5 | play -t wav - \
chorus 0.4 0.8 20 0.5 0.10 2 -t \
echo 0.9 0.8 33 0.9 \
echo 0.7 0.7 10 0.2 \
echo 0.9 0.2 55 0.5 \
gain 10

Cheers..

[wolterh]

Nice job! The female voice is a lot more clear! Sometimes I barely understand the other one!