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Aachen 4 days ago  [ - ]

    $ apt install espeak-ng
    $ espeak-ng 'Hello, World!'
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)

0xbadcafebee 4 days ago  [ - ]

  $ apt install festival
  $ echo "Hello, World!" | festival --tts
Not impressively better, but I find festival slightly more intelligible.
Aachen 4 days ago  [ - ]

Will give it a spin, thanks!

0xbadcafebee 4 days ago  [ - ]

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!'"

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??