Ubuntu – The “Speak Text” feature in Okular is not working. How to get it to work

okularsoftware-recommendationtext to speech

I'm currently using Ubuntu 18.04 and Okular for viewing pdf documents. I thought it would be convenient if I could use the text to speech feature. I tried following all the instructions given here: http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/listen_your_books_epub_pdf_okular/ (which was the only source I could find online) and I'm yet unable to get the text-to-speech feature working. Can you please tell me what should I do to get this working? If it is not possible because it was deprecated, can you please recommend a good alternative?

I tried opening the application from the terminal to listen to the audio. This was the output on the terminal when I selected a part of the text and clicked "Speak Text":

using null output device, none available
qt.speech.tts.flite: "Failed to start audio output (error 1)"

Best Answer

Program packages

Install two packages

sudo apt install poppler-utils espeak

Copy and paste text

If you can

copy and paste a piece of text from a pdf document directly or
create a text file your-file.txt with
```
pdftotext your-file.pdf
```
and open the text file in a text editor and copy a piece of text from there,

then you can paste the piece of text into a terminal window, where espeak is running.

$ espeak

or if there is annoying warning output

$ espeak 2>/dev/null

Press Enter and espeak will wait for input from the terminal, so copy and paste some text from your pdf file in okular (or from some other program as illustrated with your question's title in my firefox,

The “Speak Text” feature in Okular is not working. How do I get it to work?

Press Enter to start reading aloud. Copy and paste some other pieces of text and press Enter to listen to them. Quit from espeak with ctrl C.

See the screenshot:

Pipe text into `espeak`

You can redirect the output into espeak and listen to all the text from a pdf file,

pdftotext your-file.pdf /dev/stdout | espeak

or if you have a text file, read from it directly,

< your-file.txt espeak

or if you want a talking clock

LC_TIME=C date '+%A, %B, %-d, %Y; %H and %M' | espeak

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to get espeak working

Please, run this test on the command line (AKA, terminal):

espeak "Hello, I am Espeak, the voice synthesizer" --stdout | paplay

That should work, but if you want the Linux voice synthesizer to read your text out loud, you should run and enable Orca (the GNOME default screen reader). It work with Evince, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.

Ubuntu – add a commandline synthesis engine to jovie (text to speech for KDE)

After some investigations, I found a way for that using command line. If Jovie is working correctly with espeak and libttspico-utils is installed.

on konsole type

~$ spd-conf

and answer the default answer for each question. This will create a conf file in ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf

edit this file and uncomment the line containing "pico-generic"

...
#AddModule "ibmtts"       "sd_ibmtts"    "ibmtts.conf"
#AddModule "cicero"        "sd_cicero"     "cicero.conf"
 AddModule "pico-generic" "sd_generic"     "pico-generic.conf"

 # DO NOT REMOVE the following line unless you have
 # a specific reason -- this is the fallback output module
 # that is only used when no other modules are in use
 #AddModule "dummy"         "sd_dummy"      ""
...

Then edit the file ~/.kde/share/config/kttsdrc, and change the outputModule of your talker from espeak to pico-generic

[Talkers]
Sam=<voice name="Sam" lang="en" outputModule="pico-generic" voiceName="" voiceType="1"><prosody volume="0" rate="0" pitch="0" /></voice>

Check that speech-dispatcher is in user mode, by checking the file /etc/defaults/speech-dispatcher it should say:

RUN=no

To be sure, restart the computer.

The first time I used TTS, I got an DBUS error message, but after it is working fine.

Hope it will help.