Text to speech applet

by cardsurf

Score 5

Issues Website Download

UUID: text-to-speech-applet@cardsurf

Last edited:

4 months ago 2024-07-08, 17:03

Last commit: [b8f6940e] Add Catalan translations (#6196)

A text reading applet

README

Text to speech applet

A text reading applet for Linux Mint Cinnamon

Features

read aloud text
pause/resume reading aloud the text
read lines and stop
reading is stopped after the specified number of lines
reading is resumed from the line it was stopped
customization
- customize voice parameters such as: pitch, amplitude and speed
- pick the clipboard that contains the text to read
- set icons displayed in the panel

Download

Download zip archive

Installation

Extract .zip archive to ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets
Enable the applet in Cinnamon settings

Text-to-speech engine

A default text-to-speech engine used by the applet is espeak. To install the engine in Linux Mint type in a terminal:

sudo apt install espeak

To use other engine change Voice command parameter in the applet configuration.

To start reading

Highlight the text to read
Click on the applet to read the text

To stop reading

Click on the applet when the text is read

To pause/resume reading

Click the middle mouse button on the applet when the text is read

Voice configuration

To customize the voice command:

Right click on the applet and click on "Configure"
In the "Configuration" section customize the voice command

Source code

Browse the source of the applet in the original repository.

Log In To Comment!

5 Comments

z-108-2 months ago

Ended up using edge-tts with this. Installed with in terminal: pipx install edge-tts Then paste this into the 'voice command' box in the applet: edge-playback --text And that's it. Sometimes take a second or two to start playback, so just wait to tts to play. Only works with internet connection though...

timvalen-6 years ago

Very handy and works well. I use it when my eyes get tired of reading. Thank you

Don Edwards-6 years ago

I love the convenience of this - just highlight some text and click the button in the panel - but by default it uses espeak which is not the best quality. I have Festival installed and working on its own, but have not succeeded in configuring this applet to use it. Do you know how to get the applet working with Festival - or a suggestion for another TTS engine than works with the applet and is better than espeak?

Michael H-9 months ago

## Step 1. a: create a file and paste into it #!/bin/bash tts=$1 # The first parameter passed to the script echo " $tts" | festival --tts b. I named this file "tts". c. make the tts script you just saved executable. d. copy or move this tts script to your local binaries directory copy this into your terminal session: mv tts ~\.local\bin e. confirm tts now works copy this into terminal session: tts hello f. set festival voice or other optimization Your user level config file for festival is ".festivalrc". This goes into your home directory. My festival.rc now contains a single line (set! voice_default 'voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts) g. config the Cinnamon applet The config is just the script name you just created: tts $ cp tts ~\.local

al-mission-2016-6 years ago

Hi cardsurf. Good app, sometimes useful. But, could you add an ability to start/stop it by some keystroke (shortcut). Mouse cliking is not always convenient. Or maybe there is a mean how to do it without app modification?