Chapter 21. Speech Synthesis

Difficult-o-Meter: 4 ( fairly high Linux knowledge required)

Covers:

rsynth	ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/comp.speech/sources/
Festival	http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

Question: I think it would be cool to have my Linux system talk to me, maybe to tell me when mail arrives and who it's from or to remind me of appointments if I'm deep into coding. How can I do this?

Answer: Read this chapter! This is a situation where you should be glad you're running Linux, since you'll need to piece together many different tools to do the job.

Actually, there are two major ways to speech-enable a Linux system: the hardware way and the software way. Many companies sell internal or external hardware devices for synthesizing speech, targeting their products at disabled computer users. This chapter is not about accessibility under Linux; there are already good online references discussing this issue, and the major desktop environments all have some degree of support for accessibility. Instead, this chapter is concerned with the no-cost route of software synthesis and, more importantly, with tying in speech synthesis with all the other tools available on a Linux system to create a program that is more than the sum of its parts . I'll begin by discussing some concepts underlying speech synthesis, and then jump right into some applications with (in my opinion) a pretty high "cool factor."