Hey all,
As some of you may know my house is powered by Linux
Anyway, I've been trying out the Linux text-to-speech options and they are far behind windows and mac, they sounds like robots...Also, the system I'm running on (1.2GHz, 512MB) has a hard time doing TTS in a timely manner, there is an annoying delay before it starts talking (like a robot)
So I've heard a bunch of really nice TTS voices of which none are available to me. Therefore I've decided to go with pre-recorded TTS voices generated from my Mac, and a hybrid of native TTS with pre-recorded as well.
Then I copy the sound files over to my linux machine into a sounds folder. I break them down into re-usable phrases like; "excuse me", "thank you", "goodnight", "good morning", and a recording of everybody's name in the house.
If you're interested in the command line syntax on a mac it is:
say "excuse me," -o excuseme.aiff
Then once transferred to my linux machine, I have them play in macros/triggers/scripts whatever you want to call them like this:
play -q excuseme.aiff brandt.aiff dinner.aiff thankyou.aiff
The "-q" is so the play command doesn't spit out any unnecessary text on the command line since I run it headless, don't need it to show up in the logs.
Now if there is some text that needs to be generated on the fly like the temperature (not going to pre-record hundreds of numbers) I have to do it like this:
flite -voice slt $TEMPERATURE tmp.aiff &; play -q excuseme.aiff brandt.aiff temperature.aiff tmp.aiff thankyou.aiff; rm tmp.aiff
This uses flite TTS program to generate a temp sound file called tmp.aiff from the variable $TEMPERATURE with the voice "slt" and run in the background (&). Then play will start right away with the pre-recorded voices, will insert the tmp.aiff sound file which sounds a bit different but both are female voices. Lastly it will delete the temp sound file.
Now, my question to you is; what pre-recorded voice sound phrases are you using? I'm trying to build up my library....