Questions[text-to-speech](ubuntu)

I recently installed Wine according to this answer and “Balabolka”, a very good TTS program that runs smoothly under Windows, afterwards. Wine did not install SAPI 4 or SAPI 5 voices which are required to use the program. So, I downloaded a free German (Steffi) and a free British English (Emily) SAPI 5 voice and installed them as well.

Unfortunately, Balabolka does not recognise these voices although they are installed. What can I do? Usually, Balabolka should be able to detect the voices automatically. But this does not work under Ubuntu. Furthermore, Balabolka does not seem to have an option which enables the user to manually select the installed voices if they are not detected by Balabolka itself.

Edit 1: I just saw that there is an option where one could (theoretically) select different voices but the option is greyed out.

Edit 2: It seems to be possible to install SAPI 4 voices so that Balabolka recognises them but I do not know how this can be achieved. I tried installing a SAPI 4 voice but it did not show up when I started the program. Having a SAPI 4 voice, however, would be at least better than having no solution at all.

I'm currently using Ubuntu 18.04 and Okular for viewing pdf documents. I thought it would be convenient if I could use the text to speech feature. I tried following all the instructions given here: http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/listen_your_books_epub_pdf_okular/ (which was the only source I could find online) and I'm yet unable to get the text-to-speech feature working. Can you please tell me what should I do to get this working? If it is not possible because it was deprecated, can you please recommend a good alternative?

I tried opening the application from the terminal to listen to the audio. This was the output on the terminal when I selected a part of the text and clicked "Speak Text":

using null output device, none available
qt.speech.tts.flite: "Failed to start audio output (error 1)"

In Kubuntu 18.04 Okular can read any selection text, or the whole document by default.

That is great, it is using qtspeech5 but

1. How do I set the language?
2. How can I use it from the CLI?

Can't find any setting in system-settings for speech.

spd-say "Hello world!"

I'm running Ubuntu 17.10 on a laptop (Dell XPS 15). I haven't noticed any audio problems on this machine with any other application. I've done sudo apt dist-upgrade pretty recently so everything is pretty much up to date.

> lspci | grep Audio
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)

> spd-say --version
spd-say: 0.8.7
Copyright (C) 2002-2012 Brailcom, o.p.s.

> uname -sr
Linux 4.13.0-39-generic

The problem persists if I change the volume on the computer, but if I run the application randomly a couple of times with the parameters -i -50 (decreased volume) it goes away temporarily, but I am looking for a more permanent solution.

Could you please help me to install voices from here, I read the manual But I don't know how can 'Get the en1'.