How can I read out a text file?

Question

I want to convert text in file a.txt to sound & play it using APLAY. any suggestions please?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 15 '19 at 06:31

1

You can use Festival.

text2wave myfile.txt | aplay

It is widely available in distributions and provides different voices.

answered Mar 15 '19 at 06:31

Jakub Lucký

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Piping no longer works with text2wave [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=861211] yet using festival its possible to do `festival --tts file.txt` – user174174 Mar 15 '19 at 08:35

sudodus · Answer 2 · 2020-08-05T18:57:53.397

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espeak can read aloud in several languages. English is default, but you can use the option -v sv for Swedish and corresponding voices for other languages. See man espeak for more details. For example, change the speed, if you think espeak speaks too fast.

You can install espeak from the repository Universe,

sudo apt install espeak

and it can read from a string, a file or from standard input (you can pipe into it), for example

espeak 'Hello World'
espeak < /etc/hostname
date '+It is %H %M'| espeak

So it should work for you to run

espeak < a.txt

See also this link.

edited Aug 05 '20 at 18:57

answered Mar 15 '19 at 14:10

sudodus

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or espeak-ng of course ;) – Grzegorz Wierzowiecki Aug 05 '20 at 18:51

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 05 '20 at 18:51

0

flite : http://www.festvox.org/flite/

echo 'Hello world' | flite

answered Aug 05 '20 at 18:51

Grzegorz Wierzowiecki

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How can I read out a text file?

3 Answers3