Howto: Text to speech your email before sending with eSpeak or Festival, Evolution and Ubuntu Linux
July 30, 2009 – 2:58 pmThese steps will give you a GUI only way to proof listen to your email from Evolution.
Something that I really missed from the Windows world is a little program called ReadPlease. It allowed me to listen to my emails before I sent them. I’m terrible at proof reading my own emails, especially right after I write them.
This morning I was tired of going without it and spent an hour or so on learning about TTS (Text To Speech) and Linux. True to Linux community form, there are loads of threads, bug and ubergeeky websites dedicated to TTS software packages. Most of which have crudy documentation.
The two I tried were festival and eSpeak. Festival has GUI front end that I could not get to work… It’s just as well, really. I want something simple that can read my email from Evolution so I don’t make my self look like an ass by sending something like “We’ll get you swearch restilts up in two weeks. We are really proffessionale”.
This method works with eSpeak and Festival. eSpeak voice quality sucks out of the box. There’s probably a way to tweak them to be less robotic. However, I don’t want to spent my finite time on it!
So, Festival was the one I went with.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Install the festival package.
sudo apt-get install Festival
2. Install a voice for Festival. Festival does not install a voice…. good thinkin’ eh?
This command installs an plain jane, even boring, American English male voice. Still, the quality is far better the eSpeak.
sudo apt-get install festvox-kdlpc16k
3. (optional) You can take a look at all the avilable packages and voices by doing this:
apt-cache search festival
4. Set up the magic buttonby creating a new link to application on your desktop or where ever you want. Give is a name and pick an icon that makes you feel good. Set the command in the button be the following:
echo reading ~/Desktop/email; w3m -T text/html -dump ~/Desktop/email | festival –tts
Make the command run in a terminal window; this is really needed but it’s visual feedback that you might like to have when you’re proof listening. Save the new button.
5. Start a new email in Evolution. Save the email as a file called ‘email’ on your Desktop. …Note: saving as a draft is not the same thing as saving as a file called ‘email’ on your Desktop.
6. Click the button you created.
You should see a new terminal open and print some like:
‘reading /home/yourname/Desktop/email’
Your email will begin being read too.
That’s it!
FYI: Ubuntu comes with eSpeak installed… So, you might want to test it first. If you like it, there’s no need to install Festival.