Hey guys,
I spent some time today playing around with pico2wave and building a simple PHP script to replicate what the Google TTS service does. Had some reasonable success, instructions below.
You should be able to run this on a local server (using apache or the like) and then point your Google TTS binding to this URL. It expects two parameters in the URL - language (e.g. en-GB) and message to translate.
Installation
- install the necessary dependencies (pico2wave, lame)
- sudo apt-get install libttspico0 libttspico-utils libttspico-dev libttspico-data lame
- install PHP composer (needed to install/use phplame)
- curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php – --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
- see https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md for more details
- copy the two files attached here to a folder under /var/www
- e.g. /var/www/tts
- ensure your web server has sufficient permissions to create files in this directory (e.g. owned by www-data)
- run composer to resolve the necessary dependencies
- sudo composer install
- setup your web server to allow requests to /var/www/tts
- beyond the scope of these instructions
- test by typing in the following to your browser;
I am using this in my hacked Squeezebox speak action (which I have hardcoded to call this URL) and it is nice and quick and the GB voice is quite fluid and sounds really good IMO.
Let me know if this helps!
Ben