Has anyone got a Text to Speech engine installed?

Question

Just wondering whether anyone has got a Text to Speech engine installed on the Pi?It would make a great addition to almost any programming project to make it talk to the user!

Answer 1

Yes it is possible; I saw a YouTube video of the Pi reading the news using festival.

Use the following command to install festival using Debian

$ sudo apt-get install festival festival-freebsoft-utils

To make it speak simply pipe it the text or file you want it to read, like so

echo  "Hello World"| festival --tts

References:

1. http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=40548

Answer 2

Or install espeak:

$ sudo apt-get install espeak # For Debian
$ sudo pacman -S espeak # For Arch Linux

And to make it speak:

$ espeak "Hello World" # Replace Hello World with your text, must be enclosed by ""
$ espeak -f <file> # Read out file <file>

Answer 3

flite is a cut-down version of festival which I have found to work very well on small ARM hosts.

Answer 4

I'm not sure if you are looking for a premium solution, but Cepstral just released their Callie voice for use on the Raspberry Pi. You have to call them atm to get pricing info etc, but if you don't mind paying something, just wanted to put it out there as an option.

http://www.cepstral.com/en/raspberrypi

Answer 5

Acapela works quite well on similar devices. Not free, though.