Let your computer do the talking!

[fingal]

I had fun over the weekend playing around with KMouth, which is installed on Mandriva LE. I realised - after reading the manual - that this is a front-end package for any compatible voice synthesizer, and that one of the prefered synths is called 'Festival'. A nice open source job developed by Edinburgh University.

Imagine my surprise when I found (accidentally) that Festival is pre-installed on this distro. So I went into the Configure menu in Kmouth, browsed around until I found /bin/Festival and entered /bin/Festival --tts Which tells the software to treat input as 'text to speech'.

I then rang my Mum, and had fun pretending that I had company ... I'm sure it has more serious uses: eg., for disabled people, but I got it to read a letter I wrote a few weeks earlier ...

[bigtomrodney]

It's a great tool I started using it a while back. It cracks me up. It comes with some tools - text2wav I think for converting text files to wav. Obviously!

You can use Kmouth with it too, just use

festival --tts

as the input program in the config. Though it is aimed at accesibilty, so some of the predefined phrases seem a bit bad to be playing with

Today my pain is quite strong...