Ubuntu – text to speech program for ubuntu

text to speechubuntu-10.04

Is there a program for text to speech that runs in Ubuntu Linux? Preferably not under wine.

–Edit

Sorry for the delay. My schedule this semester is a whirl wind. anyway. I've got the programs mentioned below. But i should clarify what I'm searching for. I'm Dyslexic. Reading is difficult for me. But when I have the text read a-loud to me it does wonders. The school provides all my text books in a digital form, so I need something I can just drop a large chunk of text (which may or many not be structured very cleanly. some times the text comes with all sorts of random gibberish that has caused several text to speech programs on windows crash on me before.) and have it read it to me.

Thanks, again, sorry for the delay.

Best Answer

Ubuntu includes Festival (festival package and perhaps other fest...) and Espeak (espeak package). For GUI integration, look at Orca (gnome-orca package).

Voices for languages other than English can be hard to come by. Espeak comes with English only, and Festival comes with voices in Czech, English, Finnish, Hindi, Italian, Marathi and Telugu. Both Espeak and Festival can be made to work with voices from the Mbrola project, which are free as in beer but not as in speech.

In the spirit of teaching a man to fish, I'll mention a little-known feature of the Debian/Ubuntu package system. Unfortunately, it's not available in Ubuntu's default package manager (synaptics), but it is available in the text mode package manager aptitude. Install the debtags package, then in aptitude select “Views | New Debtags browser”. This shows available packages by tags; the sound::speech tag (i.e. expand the sound catagory then its speech category) lists speech synthesis software.

Related Solutions

Word – Text-To-Speech replacement for Word

Yes, Microsoft did it again. Text-to-Speech has been removed from Word 2007.
Fortunately there is a rather easy way to implement it with a little bit of macro code.

The article Word text to speech describes how to add to Word two buttons using VBA macros, SpeakText and StopSpeaking.

Macos – Mac OS X – Quickly change voices for Text-to-Speech

I have used FastScripts to assign a shortcut to this script:

try
    set old to the clipboard as record
end try
try
    tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using command down
    delay 0.05
    say (the clipboard) using "Kyoko"
end try
try
    set the clipboard to old
end try

You could also create a service in Automator:

There is a bug in 10.7 and 10.8 where the shortcuts for Automator services don't always work until you hover over the services menu from the menu bar. WorkflowServiceRunner can also use over 100% CPU while speaking text.

Another option would be to use UI scripting to change between two voices:

tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal anchor "TTS" of pane "com.apple.preference.speech"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences"
    tell pop up button 1 of tab group 1 of window 1
        click
        delay 0.1
        if value is "Alex" then
            click menu item "Victoria" of menu 1
        else
            click menu item "Alex" of menu 1
        end if
    end tell
end tell
quit application "System Preferences"

Changing the SelectedVoiceID key in com.apple.speech.voice.prefs.plist also works, but I don't know how to apply the changes immediately.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Word – Text-To-Speech replacement for Word

Macos – Mac OS X – Quickly change voices for Text-to-Speech

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