How to make Python speak ?

Question

How could I make Python say some text ?

I could use Festival with subprocess but I won't be able to control it (or maybe in interactive mode, but it won't be clean)

Is there a Python tts library ?
Like an API for Festival, eSpeak, ... ?

Answer 1

A simple Google led me to pyTTS, and a few documents about it. It looks unmaintained and specific to Microsoft's speech engine, however.

On at least Mac OS X, you can use subprocess to call out to the say command, which is quite fun for messing with your coworkers but might not be terribly useful for your needs.

It sounds like Festival has a few public APIs, too:

Festival offers a BSD socket-based interface. This allows Festival to run as a server and allow client programs to access it. Basically the server offers a new command interpreter for each client that attaches to it. The server is forked for each client but this is much faster than having to wait for a Festival process to start from scratch. Also the server can run on a bigger machine, offering much faster synthesis. linky

There's also a full-featured C++ API, which you might be able to make a Python module out of (it's fun!). Festival also offers a pared-down C API -- keep scrolling in that document -- which you might be able to throw ctypes at for a one-off.

Perhaps you've identified a hole in the market?

Answer 2

There may not be anything 'Python specific', but the KDE and GNOME desktops offer text-to-speech as a part of their accessibility support, and also offer python library bindings. It may be possible to use the python bindings to control the desktop libraries for text to speech.

If using the Jython implementation of Python on the JVM, the FreeTTS system may be usable.

Finally, OSX and Windows have native APIs for text to speech. It may be possible to use these from python via ctypes or other mechanisms such as COM.

Answer 3

You should try using the PyTTSx package since PyTTS is outdated. PyTTSx works with the lastest python version.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyttsx/1.0 -> The package

Hope it helps