You probably now that Stephen Hawking (never got a Nobel Price) was on BigBang A LOT.
And he writes to speech synthesis and eye-tracker.
And he is giving hilarious funny interviews with this thing DECtalk DTC01…
While also saying that AI could go wrong. If AI becomes self-improving – it could outsmart us all.
also it takes some time to get used to… but then you probably get 90% of the text it reads, like this NASA news article about water and lake on mars in English:
or this science article about a lake on mars in German:
here it is:
Oh fuck – it is running Windows 7. hate the autocomplete on my android phone. it sucks. Well whatever.
so what you will need to output your own text to speech?
not much.
#apt based apt install xsel espeak festival #rpm based yum install xsel espeak festival
xsel takes text from your clipboard and puts it into a bash variable that can then be passed to espeak (src) to speak it.
the user can test the text to voice programs like this:
# use english and low pitch voice espeak -ven-us -p0 "hello world"; # use german and low pitch voice espeak -vde -p0 "hallo welt"; # you can output to file.wav espeak -ven-us -p0 "hello world" -w hello_world.wav
here comes a little espeak demo:
it almost sounds like Hawking 🙂
which one is better?
while festival has the better (more hakwing like) voice it does not handle special chars very well and does not pause after a dot. (why? oh? why?)
use it to read from text file
example: copy & paste text from webbrowser into a file.txt and then send it to:
# read in english (-ven) cat ./path/to/file.txt | espeak -ven -p30 # read in german (-vde) cat ./path/to/file.txt | espeak -vde -p30
use it to read the clipboard:
(did not work for Debian 10)
# create a new script touch /bin/talk.sh chmod +x /bin/talk.sh vim /bin/talk.sh # fill with: #!/bin/bash # also toutput text to screen xsel; text=$(xsel); if [[ $1 = "de" ]] then espeak -vde -p30 "$text"; else xsel | festival --tts --pipe fi
now the user can mark any text on your webbrowser (under mate + lightdm that is enough to get it into clipboard) but you might need to r-click it -> copy or middle-mouse button.
then go to terminal and just type talk.sh (for english) or talk.sh de (for german) and it should display and read the clipboard text.
while espeak can imitate a lot of languages “by default”, for festival you will need tts files, i could not find any except for english.
… espeak does not seem to be able to speak chinese or japanese.
espeak --voices
Pty Language Age/Gender VoiceName File Other Languages
5 af M afrikaans other/af
5 an M aragonese europe/an
5 bg - bulgarian europe/bg
5 bs M bosnian europe/bs
5 ca M catalan europe/ca
5 cs M czech europe/cs
5 cy M welsh europe/cy
5 da M danish europe/da
5 de M german de
5 el M greek europe/el
5 en M default default
2 en-gb M english _en (en-uk 2)(en 2)
2 en-gb M english en (en-uk 2)(en 2)
5 en-sc M en-scottish other/en-sc (en 4)
5 en-uk-north M english-north other/en-n (en-uk 3)(en 5)
5 en-uk-rp M english_rp other/en-rp (en-uk 4)(en 5)
5 en-uk-wmids M english_wmids other/en-wm (en-uk 9)(en 9)
2 en-us M english-us en-us (en-r 5)(en 3)
5 en-wi M en-westindies other/en-wi (en-uk 4)(en 10)
5 eo M esperanto other/eo
5 es M spanish europe/es
5 es-la M spanish-latin-am es-la (es-mx 6)(es 6)
5 et - estonian europe/et
5 fa - Farsi asia/fa
5 fa-pin - Farsi-Pinglish asia/fa-pin
5 fi M finnish europe/fi
5 fr-be M french-Belgium europe/fr-be (fr 8)
5 fr-fr M french fr (fr 5)
5 ga - irish-gaeilge europe/ga
5 grc M greek-ancient other/grc
5 hi M hindi asia/hi
5 hr M croatian europe/hr (hbs 5)
5 hu M hungarian europe/hu
5 hy M armenian asia/hy
5 hy-west M armenian-west asia/hy-west (hy 8)
5 id M indonesian asia/id
5 is M icelandic europe/is
5 it M italian europe/it
5 jbo - lojban other/jbo
5 ka - georgian asia/ka
5 kn - kannada asia/kn
5 ku M kurdish asia/ku
5 la M latin other/la
5 lt M lithuanian europe/lt
5 lv M latvian europe/lv
5 mk M macedonian europe/mk
5 ml M malayalam asia/ml
5 ms M malay asia/ms
5 ne M nepali asia/ne
5 nl M dutch europe/nl
5 no M norwegian europe/no (nb 5)
5 pa - punjabi asia/pa
5 pl M polish europe/pl
5 pt-br M brazil pt (pt 5)
5 pt-pt M portugal europe/pt-pt (pt 6)
5 ro M romanian europe/ro
5 ru M russian europe/ru
5 sk M slovak europe/sk
5 sq M albanian europe/sq
5 sr M serbian europe/sr
5 sv M swedish europe/sv
5 sw M swahili-test other/sw
5 ta M tamil asia/ta
5 tr M turkish asia/tr
5 vi M vietnam asia/vi
5 vi-hue M vietnam_hue asia/vi-hue
5 vi-sgn M vietnam_sgn asia/vi-sgn
5 zh M Mandarin asia/zh
5 zh-yue M cantonese asia/zh-yue (yue 5)(zhy 5)
manpages:
links:
http://festvox.org/voicedemos.html
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