Text to Speech

[phillw]

This is exactly what I've been looking for. I always wonder why so many Linux apps just don't work out-of-the-box and have simple GUIs, like KTTS/Kmouth and Festival.

This should be integrated into the next Ubuntu as a default app. Its small and very, very useful.

Also there is a GUI for espeak in the repo' for 10.04 It is simply called espeak-gui - It reports a couple of errors reported on launch (the author is looking into them) but works fine with either pasted text, or opening a text document

Regards,

Phill.

[go_beep_yourself]

I am visually impaired and often find it nice to have software read for me as an addition to my screen magnification software. So I do understand the desire to have software that will read what I tell it to read.

...

KTTS- KDE text to speech system
This works well with KDE, and allows items on the clipboard to be spoken.
<http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/>
I think this should be installed by default, maybe. But if it not, you can install it using synaptic package manager. The website will have a more information.

Does this have an option to automatically read clipboard contents like 2nd Speech Center and TextAloud in Windows? Have you tested this with Gnome?

Read Out Loud- This is for the Adobe PDF reader, it allows for pdfs to be spoken. Very nice when you just want to listen to a PDF document.
This link has information on how to set up Read Out Loud
<http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/8.0/Standard/help.html?content=WS58a04a822e3e50102bd61510979419 5ff-7d15.html>
And this link has the software ...
<http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/>

I've gotten this to work in Windows. I thought the Linux version of Adobe Reader just left this feature not implemented. I just searched the link you provided. Nothing comes up when doing a search on that site for linux. I am fairly sure I've tried to use this feature in Linux before a while back, and it was "greyed out" where I couldn't click on it.

I've gotten very used to having TTS software such as 2nd Speech Center and TextAloud in Windows, and it's been a real pain in the butt not to have something as functional in Linux. I started the development of a Open Source TTS software written in Java that will use existing tts engines such as festival and espeak. I've made progress on it. Although some features are unimplemented, I will put it up on Google Code, if anyone is interested in it, and I've made some progress so far. I hope to find some coders interested in developing this software too. I've got great plans for it. I just need to implement the rest of the features, but so far, I've gotten through some hurdles.

[LequidMetal]

I tried getting the Read out loud feature to work in Ubuntu and was completely unsuccessful . Orca works with every other app including firefox but for some reason it wont work with Adobe acrobat 9 (or any other gnome pdf readers i tried ).And there seems to be very few tutorials on the subject .

[notlistening]

There is a little application called pdf2txt which when run on a pdf will put its written contents into a text file which in turn can then be very easily read with any TTS program or orca.

[go_beep_yourself]

For anybody interested in seeing an open source application similar to TextAloud and 2nd Speech Center (Windows apps) further developed, I could use some help with this project. So far, it has just been me working on it. I am trying to understand how espeak and mbrola work together, though if easier or better, I would develop this program to use festival or flite. I do not see many command line options for those apps and sence my program runs espeak with arguments gathered from the gui, I don't see the others as an option. My application is working. So far it is able to take any text highlighted and copied, and if what is highlighted is text and is different, the text is read by espeak with the default voice for horrible default espeak voice, so I am trying to understand better how espeak and mbrola work together to get some better sounding voices for this application to use. If anyones interested in seeing this project grow, please contribute whether you know how to program in Java or not, you can still contribute by trying the application and helping me to figure out how different features are used through the command line, so they can be put into the application or by packaging it as debs.

Edit: This app allows anything that can be copied as text to the clipboard to automatically be read to you whether the text is in Firefox, pdfs, email, etc.

[notlistening]

I am glad to see someone making the effort to develop tools like this. I wrote a similar tools for windows back in the day when i knew what windows was.

I think the direction you want to go is to start looking at speech dispatcher. This creates a single interface into all the most commonly used speech engines. So you only have to learn about speech dispatcher not all the different TTS engines. If better text to speech is what you want then I can recommend my project open-sapi which allows Linux users to use Windows based TTS with much nicer voices. It is under development but I have very kindly added in a command line interface for it which is quite straight forward.

The wiki information is quite out of date and there is a hidden development branch that has taken on new features and got quite a lot of bug fixes. So if you're online on irc MSN skype and your interested then let me know.

[2hot6ft2]

I am trying to understand how espeak and mbrola work together, though if easier or better, I would develop this program to use festival or flite.

You might take a look at Gespeaker it' a front end to espeek and uses Mbrola add ons which are a bit more tolerable and it has some controls for how they are managed along with a decent GUI. Sorry but I have no programming knowledge to help with anything.
Here's the home page for it.
http://code.google.com/p/gespeaker/

[hellocatfood]

You might take a look at Gespeaker it' a front end to espeek and uses Mbrola add ons which are a bit more tolerable and it has some controls for how they are managed along with a decent GUI. Sorry but I have no programming knowledge to help with anything.
Here's the home page for it.
http://code.google.com/p/gespeaker/

Thanks for that! It's the best/easiest one that I've used so far

[go_beep_yourself]

You might take a look at Gespeaker it' a front end to espeek and uses Mbrola add ons which are a bit more tolerable and it has some controls for how they are managed along with a decent GUI. Sorry but I have no programming knowledge to help with anything.
Here's the home page for it.
http://code.google.com/p/gespeaker/

I have gespeaker, and although it is a nice app, it does not do what I want. I don't need any coding help. What I need help is to understand how mbrola and espeaker work together, so I can further develop the application I have.

I was about to continue developing my Text To Speech software some more, and have it use mbrola voices.

I looked at the documentation here.

file:///usr/share/doc/espeak/mbrola.html (note: you can open this in Firefox by pasting the above line in FF's address bar)

And it says

"The Mbrola voices are cost-free but are not open source. They are available from the Mbrola website at:
http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis...brcopybin.html"

So I go to that website, and there are many downloads listed. I'd like to know what the differences are and what each download is for.

From the website:

# LINUX i386 / ppc / alpha / ultra1 <-- these I am not certain about
# LINUX / Pocket PC <-- This must be for a PDA running Linux
# LINUX / Ircha / Mbrola / ES1 DBA / Z80 <-- I don't know what the different downloads here are for, but I'd like to know
what each are. They may all be beneficial to the program I am creating.
# AMD64/Linux <-- this one is obviously for Linux users running a 64-bit kernel
# ARM/Linux (tested on Nokia N800 and N810) <-- this one is obvious it runs on cell phones

Could someone please explain what the difference between these download are and what the ones I am not sure about do? It's not the programming I am stuck on. It is things like this that I must understand in order to further the program, and I want it my program to be able to used by others, not just myself.

[VastOne]

You might take a look at Gespeaker it' a front end to espeek and uses Mbrola add ons which are a bit more tolerable and it has some controls for how they are managed along with a decent GUI. Sorry but I have no programming knowledge to help with anything.
Here's the home page for it.
http://code.google.com/p/gespeaker/

I followed the gespeaker instructions to a T and successfully installed both it and Mbrola.

But where is it? I have no starting app icon anywhere and running gespeaker or Gespeaker from terminal gives me nothing???

Any help appreciated!