[Solved]AT&T Natural Voices with jovie— Possible?

[bkpsusmitaa]

Transcendence / Solution provided at the end of this thread.

[bkpsusmitaa]

Query originally posted on 2018-03-24 06:15

Many years back I had observed TextAloud with AT&T Natural Voice. It was as natural as a computer generated voice could be.

I have since searched similar applications in Debian and other flavours of GNU-Linux or FOSS, but failed to find one.

I searched the AT&T site for the software but found nothing. However, software companies like these offer such software: Audrey (16khz UK English) AT&T Natural Voice

Search queries in Google such as these:

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natural voice site:www.att.com/

leads to AT&T Technology Licensing - Speech Recognition which has this information:

Natural Voices ®
AT&T Natural Voices® patented technology provides engines, languages and custom voices for text-to-speech (TTS) applications. Contact Wizard Software for further information at http://www.wizzardsoftware.com. Best in class accuracy in US English, U.K. English, Spanish, German, and French.

If I buy the license to use one British English voice is it possible in Debian to direct Jovie to use this natural voice?

I went to the webpage of Wizzardsoftware. It says:

... Wizzard offers desktop or server SDKs for Developers in Windows or Linux, or a wavefile-producing application for high volume deployment by non-technical users, making this voice technology available to anyone with a need for commercial grade TTS that can be deployed across an extensive variety of environments ...

I then went to their ordering page. They sell only SDKsAT&T Natural Voices SDK for Linux

I don't need their SDKs. I need only the Natural Voice speech engine to be used by a Linux application. I have posted the query at their Sales Inquiry webpage.

There is a post in Ubuntu forum that discusses these issues. The thread is: Natural Sounding Text to Speech?

Debian has this package: svox which has libttspico-utils

SVOX is available as source, while libttspico-utils is a binary. libttspico-utils depend on two binaries:

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libttspico-data

and

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libttspico0

Has anyone using Debian implemented the AT&T Natural Voice Speech Engine with any TTS package? Jovie?
===================================== The above Query originally posted on 2018-03-24 06:15 =========================================

I just received the answer to my question: ... Possible?
Speech Technologies Dept., Wizzard Speech LLC, wizzardsoftware.com, the software company involved with the AT&T Natural Voices speech engine part, informed:
"... The AT&T Natural Voices engine/runtimes comes in a developers toolkit and must be integrated into an application to voice enable it. We provide the toolkit and licenses in volume for further distribution ... "

[bkpsusmitaa]

We could try libttspico0. It is really good. This installs pico2wave in our systems. It is a very good TTS.
Then use the attached script file to read the text file.
The supporting documents were combed from various webpages.
There is also a nice script here: https://github.com/GwadaLUG/pico-read-speaker

In LibreOffice there is an add-on, read_text.2018.08.12.oxt, that has an option using an external program such as python3 to read libreOffice documents via this code:

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/usr/bin/python2.7

or

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/usr/bin/python3.3

Then,

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"(PICO_READ_TEXT_PY)" --language=(SELECTION_LANGUAGE_COUNTRY_CODE)
--visible=false "(TMP)"

The Add-on is downloaded from
https://extensions.libreoffice.org/exte ... .08.12.oxt

There is also an interesting topic here:
From: https://askubuntu.com/questions/722657/ ... ch-for-kde
But I have still not been able to implement pico to be used from within Jovie.

I do hope that some good programmer would have a better idea.

Ultimately, my objective is to read books from my laptop/desktop using TTS with a simple script that would allow me to select a book and read it with pico2wave at 48000Hz.

I can already achieve this from with Android-x86 on my laptop, but native Debian is the best option for me. I love Debian.