Script for text to speech

A little debian script to get your R-Pi to speak to you:

Sorting out the dependency

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sudo apt-get install mplayer


The script itself:

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#!/bin/bash
say() { local IFS=+;/usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa -really-quiet -noconsolecontrols "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=$*"; }
say $*


You probably need to modprobe snd_bcm2835 as well. The R-Pi's speech is output from hdmi so my /boot/config.txt contains this line:

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hdmi_drive=2


A little test

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./speak my raspberry pi speaks to me


Good idea using google's text-to-wave engine, but that will obviously only work if the pi always has internet access.

Festival TextToSpeech worked straightaway for me on debian wheezy:

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apt-get install festival


uses around 20MB on the SD card.

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echo "I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" | festival --tts