Made myself a text to speech server today: Festival

[viking60]

Well I like the occasional prank...So it has been a dream of mine to SSH into my homebox when I am away and make the computer speak...

So I installed festival from the repos and happily danced away to my terminal.
Then I wrote my first message to be spoken:

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echo "Hello!  Is anyone home? May the force be with you" | festival --tts

and...
Nothing

Ok so I needed a language file too - I found and installed festival-english
Now it should be OK

...and got

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Linux: can't open /dev/dsp

Ah back to the drawing board then.

It turns out that only people with a working text to speech server get it to work right out of the box so here is what I had to do:

Find
/usr/share/festival/festival.scm and edit it and put these lines at the very bottom:


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(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'aiff)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "paplay $FILE --client-name=Festival --stream-name=Speech")

This is for people with pulseaudio - like me.
ALSA people can have a look here:


If you use ALSA you need to add these lines instead:

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(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")

So I happily type

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echo "Hello!  Is anyone home? Did you know that bjoernvold.com rocks?" | festival --tts   

...and


SUCCESS!

My speakers announced the message

PS: on some distros the file to edit might be ~/.festivalrc

The syntax is easy

echo "whatever you want to say" | festival --tts

PS on Mageia a simple

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sudo urpmi festival

will take care of everything for you.
Install it at you are good to go with this:

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echo hello $USER you are super awesome i am your processor | festival --tts 

In Centos it is even simpler:

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sudo yum install festival

No questions asked, and it comes with a sexy female voice

In Debian 8 everything works right out of the box after a:

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sudo apt-get install festival

It looks like my trouble shooting above is mostly for Arch based distros.

[viking60]

One word of warning,

Be careful with these pranks! I tested it and it scared the living daylights out of her. She was convinced she was hacked and pulled the plug which naturally broke off my ssh connection.
And was in general paranoid after that.

Me laughing, did not help much either so I am only alive due to my robust Berserk nature - trying to spare my fellow Berserks the same suffering....

It sounds much better than this on the computer but I guess I lost some quality in converting it to mp3

[viking60]

Not practical you say?
Well here is one example why you absolutely need this:

Since you are loaded and need to keep track of currencies worldwide you can get the currency in a terminal.
To get the daily course add this at the end of your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

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currency() {
curl -s "http://www.google.com/finance/converter?a=$1&from=$2&to=$3" | sed '/res/!d;s/<[^>]*>//g';
}

Reload bash with

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source ~/.bashrc

Now you can go to a terminal and type

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currency 1 usd eur

This will convert 1 usd to eur
You can convert mostly any currency from the first to the second like this. And that is great but naturally you need your computer to read the values to you too so replace the code above with this one:

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##Setting up currency conversion in the terminal
currency() {
curl -s "http://www.google.com/finance/converter?a=$1&from=$2&to=$3" | sed '/res/!d;s/<[^>]*>//g' | festival --tts;
curl -s "http://www.google.com/finance/converter?a=$1&from=$2&to=$3" | sed '/res/!d;s/<[^>]*>//g';
}


Type
currency 1 usd eur
And the computer will read the values to you before they are printed in the terminal. You can take any currency like currency 1 usd nok which will convert one USD to NOK or currency 1 nok eur and so on...
The currencies are updated in real time (I suspect there might be a small delay in comparison to the paid services - depending on how fast Google get the data, which I suspect is pretty fast) and based on non free services that Google do provide for us. The sources for these are mainly Reuters and EBS.
It will look like this in the terminal

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~/ curreny 1 eur nok
1 EUR = 8.5158 NOK


And you will hear it too.
Time to admit it: You will never be able to live without that