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Talkey

Talkey is a Simple Text-To-Speech (TTS) interface library with multi-language and multi-engine support.

Installation

pip install talkey

You need to install the TTS engines by yourself. Talkey supports:

  • Flite
  • SVOX Pico
  • Festival
  • eSpeak
  • mbrola via eSpeak

I've tried SVOX Pico, Festival and eSpeak. I've discarded Flite because it's not in the official repositories. Of those three the one that gives the most natural support is SVOX Pico. To install it execute:

sudo apt-get install libttspico-utils

It also supports the following networked TTS Engines:

  • MaryTTS (needs hosting).
  • Google TTS (cloud hosted)

I obviously discard Google for privacy reasons, and MaryTTS too because it needs you to run a server, which is inconvenient for most users and pico gives us enough quality.

Usage

At its simplest use case:

import talkey
tts = talkey.Talkey()
tts.say("I've been really busy being dead. You know, after you murdered me.")

It automatically detects languages without any further configuration:

tts.say("La cabra siempre tira al monte")

References