Getting Started

Installation

Install from pypi:

pip install talkey

Engines supported

By default it will try to locate and use the local instances of the following TTS engines:

• Flite
• SVOX Pico
• Festival
• eSpeak
• mbrola via eSpeak

Installing one or more of those engines should allow the libary to function and generate speech.

It also supports the following networked TTS Engines:

• MaryTTS (needs hosting)

• Google TTS (cloud hosted) Requires:

  pip install gTTS
  

Usage

At its simplest use case:

import talkey
tts = talkey.Talkey()
tts.say('Old McDonald had a farm')

If you get a talkey.base.TTSError: No supported languages error, it means that you don’t have a supported TTS engine installed. Please see below.

Simple configuration

For best results you should configure it:

import talkey
tts = talkey.Talkey(
    preferred_languages = ['en', 'af', 'el', 'fr'],
    espeak = {
        'languages': {
            'en': {
                'voice': 'english-mb-en1',
                'words_per_minute': 130
            },
        }
    })
tts.say('Old McDonald had a farm')

Installing TTS engines

Ubuntu/Debian:

For festival:

sudo apt-get install festival

For flite:

sudo apt-get install flite

For SVOX Pico:

sudo apt-get install libttspico-utils

For eSpeak:

sudo apt-get install espeak

For mbrola and en1 voice (example, there are many other mbrola- packages):

sudo apt-get install mbrola-en1

Windows:

Install eSpeak:

Go to http://espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html and download and install setup_espeak-<version>.exe

For mbrola and its voices:

Go to http://espeak.sourceforge.net/mbrola.html and download and install MbrolaTools<version>.exe and follow directions to install voices from http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html

For google TTS:

install python package gTTS

Download ffmpeg from http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

Extract with 7Zip, and add the \bin folder to the PATH.

e.g.:

extract to C:\ffmpeg and add C:\ffmpeg\bin to the PATH

(In cmd.exe you should be able to just run ffmpeg and see it showing information, then it is working right)