say "This is a test message" --voice="Organ"
say "This is a test message" --voice="Good News"
say "This is a test message" --voice="Bad News"
say "This is a test message" --voice="Jester"
It takes some adjustment and sounds a lot worse than what e.g. Google ships proprietarily on your phone, but after ~30 seconds of listening (if I haven't used it recently) I understand it just as well as I understand the TTS engine on my phone
If there's a more modern package that sounds more human that's a similar no-brainer to install, I'd be interested, but just to note that this part of the problem has been solved for many years now, even if the better-sounding models are usually not as openly licensed, orders of magnitude more resource-intensive, limited to a few languages, and often less reliable/predictable in their pronunciation of new or compound words (usually not all of these issues at once)
I also just found something that sounds genuinely realistic: Piper (https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl/tree/main). It's slow but apparently you can run it as a daemon to be faster, and it integrates with Home Assistant and Speech Dispatcher.
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip libsndfile1 ffmpeg
$ python -m venv piper-tts
$ ./venv/piper-tts/bin/pip install piper-tts
$ ./venv/piper-tts/bin/python3 -m piper.download_voices en_US-lessac-medium
$ ./venv/piper-tts/bin/piper -m en_US-lessac-medium -- 'This will play on your speakers.'
To manage the install graphically, you can use Pied (https://pied.mikeasoft.com/), which has a snap and a flatpak. That one's really cool because you can choose the voice graphically which makes it easy to try them out or switch voices. To play sound you just use "spd-say 'Hello, world!'"
If you're on Mac, you can use `say`, e.g.,
EDIT: I'm having way too much fun with this lolLOL that's pretty funny, thank you for the share!
If there's a more modern package that sounds more human that's a similar no-brainer to install, I'd be interested, but just to note that this part of the problem has been solved for many years now, even if the better-sounding models are usually not as openly licensed, orders of magnitude more resource-intensive, limited to a few languages, and often less reliable/predictable in their pronunciation of new or compound words (usually not all of these issues at once)
Will give it a spin, thanks!
I also just found something that sounds genuinely realistic: Piper (https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl/tree/main). It's slow but apparently you can run it as a daemon to be faster, and it integrates with Home Assistant and Speech Dispatcher.
To manage the install graphically, you can use Pied (https://pied.mikeasoft.com/), which has a snap and a flatpak. That one's really cool because you can choose the voice graphically which makes it easy to try them out or switch voices. To play sound you just use "spd-say 'Hello, world!'"More crazy: Home Assistant did a "Year of Voice" project (https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/) that culminated in a real open-source voice assistant product (https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/) !!! And it's only $60??