Natural Sounding Text to Speech?

SVOX pico2wave

sudo apt install libttspico-utils

A very minimalistic TTS, a better sounding than espeak or mbrola (to my mind). Some information here.

I don't understand why pico2wave is, compared to espeak or mbrola, rarely discussed. It's small, but sounds really good (natural). Without modification you'll hear a natural sounding female voice.

AND ... compared to Mbrola, it recognise Units and speaks it the right way!
For example:

• 2°C → two degrees
• 2m → two meters
• 2kg → two kilograms

After installation I use it in a script:

#!/bin/bash
pico2wave -w=/tmp/test.wav "$1"
aplay /tmp/test.wav
rm /tmp/test.wav

Then run it with the desired text:

<scriptname>.sh "hello world"

or read the contents of an entire file:

<scriptname>.sh "$(cat <filename>)"

That's all to have a lightweight, stable working TTS on Ubuntu.

Pico and espeak are fun and easy to get to work, but they're not all that good. The default Festival voices are also not that good. However, Festival is a scheme-based speech framework, where a number of researchers have built much better plug-in voices. You can easily surpass the pico2wave quality on stock Ubuntu, because one of those voices is available as a ready-made package.

To make Festival sound natural, here's what to do:

sudo apt-get install festival
sudo apt-get install festvox-us-slt-hts
festival -i
festival> (voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts) 
festival> (SayText "Don't hate me, I'm just doing my job!")

You can do it from the command line by using -b (or --batch) and putting each command into single quotes:

festival -b '(voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts)' \
    '(SayText "The temperature is 22 degrees centigrade and there is a slight breeze from the west.")'

You can get other quite good voices from the Nitech repository, but installing them is finicky, and the default paths changed so the file name references in the bundled scheme files may need to be manually edited to work on stock Ubuntu.

SpeakIt!

I believe Ive found the best TTS software for free using a Google Chrome extension called "SpeakIt". This only works in the Chrome browser for me on Ubuntu. It doesnt work with Chromium for some reason. SpeakIt comes with two female voices which both sound very realistic compared to everything else out there. There are at least four more male & female voices listed s Chrome extensions if you search the Chrome Web Store using "TTS" as your query.

Usage: For use on a website. you highlight the text you want to be read and either right click and "SpeakIt" or click the SpeakIt icon docked on the Chrome top bar.

Firefox users also have two options. Within Firefox addons, do a search for TTS and you should find "Click Speak" and also "Text to Voice". The voices are not as good as the Chrome SpeakIt voices, but are definitely usable.

The SpeakIt extension uses iSpeech technology and for a price of $20 a year, the site can convert text to MP3 audio files. You can input text, URLs, RSS feeds, as well as documents such as TXT, DOC, and PDF and output to MP3. You can make podcast, embed audio, etc. Here is a link, and a sample of their audio (don't know how long the link will last).

Simple Google™ TTS

Update from project page (2016): This project is currently unmaintained and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Because of the lack of a better alternative I wrote a bash script that interfaces with a perl script by Michal Fapso to provide TTS via Google Translate. From the project description:

The intention is to provide an easy to use interface to text-to-speech output via Google's speech synthesis system. A fallback option using pico2wave automatically provides TTS synthesis in case no Internet connection is found.

As it stands, the wrapper supports reading from standard input, plain text files and the X selection (highlighted text).

The main features are:

• online TTS synthesis via Google translate
• offline TTS synthesis via pico2wave
• supports a variety of different languages
• can read from CLI, text files and highlighted text
• supports reading highlighted text with fixed formatting (e.g. PDF files)

Installation and usage are documented on the project page.

I'd be glad if you gave it a try. Bug reports and any other feedback are welcome!

I have looked high and low for text to speech for Ubuntu that is high quality. There is none. My vocal cords are paralyzed so I needed TTS to add voice instructions to my Ubuntu videos. You can get commercial high quality Linux text to speech software here. It's just really expensive. I ended up buying Natural Reader for Windows (doesn't work in Ubuntu under Wine) for $40. Maybe later I will get the Linux one.

I have been conducting research on the best sounding and easily tuned text to speech voices. Below is a listing of what I thought were the top 5 products in order of sound quality. Most of the websites associated with these product have an interactive demo that will allow for you to make your own determination.

1. NeoSpeech
2. iVona
3. Acapela
4. AT&T Natural voices
5. CereProc Voices

gTTS, Google Text-to-Speech

gTTS, a Python library and CLI tool to interface with Google Translate's text-to-speech API. Writes spoken mp3 data to a file, a file-like object (bytestring) for further audio manipulation, or stdout.

Cons: CLI-only. Need to be online as it requires to request to Google public open endpoint.

sudo -H pip install gTTS  # Install

Usage

gtts-cli 'hello' --output hello.mp3
gtts-cli -l es 'Nadie es patria, todos lo somos' | play -t mp3 -

Documentation and more examples

Others

^{Some were already mentioned}

• Mimic. Installation:

    sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool libasound2-dev
    git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic.git # take a while
    cd mimic
    ./dependencies.sh --prefix="/usr/local" # take a while
    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure --prefix="/usr/local"
    make # take a while
    make check
  

• eSpeak + Gespeaker (GUI) (Gespeaker source code)

  Cons: Old and ugly

    sudo apt install espeak gespeaker
  

• Firefox

  • Google Translate, ImTranslator, Dictionary, TTS by Smart Link Corporation

• Chromium/Brave/Chrome

  • Text to speech that brings productivity
  • SpeakIt!

I find Nitech HTS voices on festival very natural and comforting over any other voices I have heard. See this link on how to set up Nitech and other sounds with festival. I have not found a good gui which I can use to configure those voices but setting them via festival.scm still works. That post is very old and you might want to find the actual installation directory using "locate festival" command

Combine SVOX tools (pico) with LibreOffice:

SVOX (pico) tools are easy to install and brings good quality voices in Ubuntu. Install it:

sudo apt-get install libttspico0 libttspico-utils libttspico-data

You can use LibreOffice in combination with SVOX (pico) tools by install the "Read Text" extension and you obtain a "GUI" for this excellent TTS software:

Set up Read Text Extension's options with Tools - Add-ons - Read selection.... Use /usr/bin/python as the external program. Select a command line option that includes the token (PICO_READ_TEXT_PY), you may want to experiment some of them.

Now you only have to select some text in LO Writer, Calc, Impress or Draw and clic on the icon added as a tool bar (a happy face with a ballon).

Here is what I did to have pure natural speech for pdf and other text files(other solutions are not natural or they're just paid services). This is actually a work around using chromium or chrome but works fast and easy.

1. Install SpeakIt! extension on your chrome or chromium.
2. Install PDF Viewer if you're using chromium(chrome already has a pdf viewer for free) and check 'Allow in incognito' and 'Allow access to file URLs' options in extensions settings of chromium.
3. Drag and drop your pdf to browser.
4. Now highlight some text and right click and select SpeakIt! so you can listen to pure natural text-to-speech.

There's also ways to open other files like .doc and .txt in chrome and do the same. There's other extensions for chrome that view pdf files, check if it fits you better. Besides you can upload all kind of texts in Google Drive and use SpeakIt! to read it for you. Another extension called 'Speak text' works the same way and has natural speech.