Gregg's MOTD

Install mimic Text-To-Speech on Slackware 15

Per the manpage: Mimic is a command line tool for synthesizing speech from text. If outfile.wav is omitted mimic will output the utterance using the computer sound card.

Mimic is based on flite and strives to extend functionality and add more languages while keeping the application fast and light.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

$ git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic1.git
$ cd mimic1/
$ ./dependencies.sh --prefix="/usr/local"
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix="/usr/local"
$ make
$ make check
$ su -c "make install"

You can list the default voices that are installed with mimic by passing it the -lv command line parameter.

$ mimic -lv
Voices available: ap slt slt_hts kal awb kal16 rms awb_time

Which tells you that there are 8 voices available.

You should now be able to do some testing at the command line:

$ mimic -t "Hello world"
$ mimic -t "Hello world"
$ mimic -t 'Hello, this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system'
$ mimic -t 'Hello, this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system' -voice slt

See the manpage for more info and options.

Tags: text-to-speech, mimic, slackware, motd

Install svox Package on Slackware 15.0 for Better Text-to-Speech

I was having issues finding a good voice synthesis for Foliate to read my books to me. I have always had issues with the sound of the espeak and espeak-ng voices. So I was searching for an alternative. I couldn’t find a way to build festival on Slackware (yet) but while searching around found a package called svox that had a SlackBuild so I thought I’d give it a try.

1. Install the svox SlackBuild package using whatever tools you would normally use. I happen to use sbotools which make use of the packages maintained by Ponce.
2. You will end up with a binary called pico2audio which is the program you need to perform all of your text-to-speech needs. See pico2audio --help for details (there aren’t really many).

It was simpler than I thought. Just open Foliate, Settings (the hamburger menu), Preferences and then enter pico2audio in the Text-to-Speech Command box and you’re done.

Tags: svox, text-to-speech, audio, pico2audio, motd