speech-dispatcher: Installation
2.1 Installation
================
This part only deals with the general aspects of installing Speech
Dispatcher. If you are compiling from source code (distribution tarball
or git), please refer to the file 'INSTALL' in your source tree.
2.1.1 The requirements
----------------------
You will need these components to run Speech Dispatcher:
* glib 2.0 (<http://www.gtk.org>)
* libdotconf 1.3 (<http://github.com/williamh/dotconf>)
* pthreads
We recommend to also install these packages:
* Festival (<http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/>)
* festival-freebsoft-utils 0.3+
(<http://www.freebsoft.org/festival-freebsoft-utils>)
* Sound icons library
(<http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz>)
2.1.2 Recommended installation procedure
----------------------------------------
* Install your software synthesizer
Although we highly recommend to use Festival for its excellent
extensibility, good quality voices, good responsiveness and best
support in Speech Dispatcher, you might want to start with eSpeak,
a lightweight multi-lingual feature-complete synthesizer, to get
all the key components working and perhaps only then switch to
Festival. Installation of eSpeak should be easier and the default
configuration of Speech Dispatcher is set up for eSpeak for this
reason.
You can of course also start with Epos or any other supported
synthesizer.
* Make sure your synthesizer works
There is usually a way to test if the installation of your speech
synthesizer works. For eSpeak run 'espeak "test"', for Flite run
'flite -t "Hello!"' and hear the speech. For Festival run
'festival' and type in
(SayText "Hello!")
(quit)
* Install Speech Dispatcher
Install the packages for Speech Dispatcher from your distribution
or download the source tarball (or git) from
<http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd> and follow the instructions in
the file 'INSTALL' in the source tree.
* Configure Speech Dispatcher
You can skip this step in most cases. If you however want to setup
your own configuration of the Dispatchers default values, the
easiest way to do so is through the 'spd-conf' configuration
script. It will guide you through the basic configuration. It
will also subsequently perform some diagnostics tests and offer
some limited help with troubleshooting. Just execute
spd-conf
under an ordinary user or system user like 'speech-dispatcher'
depending on whether you like to setup Speech Dispatcher as user or
system service respectively. You might also want to explore the
offered options or run some of its subsystems manually, type
'spd-conf -h' for help.
If you do not want to use this script, it doesn't work in your case
or it doesn't provide enough configuration flexibility, please
continue as described below and/or in ⇒Running Under Ordinary
Users.
* Test Speech Dispatcher
The simplest way to test Speech Dispatcher is through 'spd-conf -d'
or through the 'spd-say' tool.
Example:
spd-conf -d
spd-say "Hello!"
spd-say -l cs -r 90 "Ahoj"
If you don't hear anything, please ⇒Troubleshooting.
2.1.3 How to use eSpeak NG or eSpeak with MBROLA
------------------------------------------------
Please follow the guidelines at
<https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/mbrola.md>
(resp. <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/mbrola.html>) for installing
eSpeak NG (resp. eSpeak) with a set of MBROLA voices that you want to
use.
Check the 'modules/espeak-ng-mbrola-generic.conf' (resp.
'modules/espeak-mbrola-generic.conf') configuration files for the
'AddVoice' lines. If a line for any of the voices you have installed
(and it is supported by your version of eSpeak NG (resp. eSpeak), e.g.
'ls /usr/lib/*/espeak-ng-data/voices/mb/mb-*' (resp. 'ls
/usr/lib/*/espeak-data/voices/mb/mb-*')) is not contained here, please
add it. Check if 'GenericExecuteString' contains the correct name of
your mbrola binary and correct path to its voice database.
Restart speech-dispatcher and in your client, select
'espeak-ng-mbrola-generic' (resp. 'espeak-mbrola-generic') as your
output module, or test it with the following command
spd-say -o espeak-ng-mbrola-generic -l cs Testing
(resp.
spd-say -o espeak-mbrola-generic -l cs Testing
)
Info Catalog
speech-dispatcher: User's Documentation
speech-dispatcher: User's Documentation
speech-dispatcher: Running