Communication: Humans Talk. Computers Talk - Smart Home Automation with Linux and Raspberry Pi - page 164

For better voices, you need to look further afield at MBROLA.
MBROLA is a (currently) binary-only back end to Festival that provides alternate voices to Festival, without
needing to upgrade the Festival package itself. The install for the base MBROLA code, through Debian on an
Intel-based system, is as follows:
wget http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/bin/pclinux/mbrola3.0.1h_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i mbrola3.0.1h_i386.deb
You then need to download new voice data to make use of this code. Several voices are available to us here,
but the three main U.S.-centric ones are of primary interest here. I'll demonstrate an install of us1, with us2 and us3
requiring the obvious changes to the URL: 8
wget -c http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/dba/us1/us1-980512.zip
wget -c http://www.festvox.org/packed/festival/latest/festvox_us1.tar.gz
unzip -x us1-980512.zip
tar xvf festvox_us1.tar.gz
The data can then be copied into the appropriate place, according to your distribution:
# these require root privileges
mkdir -p /usr/share/festival/voices/english/us1_mbrola/
mv us1 /usr/share/festival/voices/english/us1_mbrola/
mv festival/lib/voices/english/us1_mbrola/* /usr/share/festival/voices/english/us1_mbrola/
Of course, other distributions may package this for you, thus saving the work.
You now have an alternate voice that, if installed correctly, can be proven with the Festival command (voice.list)
(with the brackets). It should now show us1_mbrola as a suitable voice, so you can test it with the following:
say us1_mbrola Hello automation
When you're happy you've found a voice you like, you can make it the default by setting VOX in the
previous script:
VOX=\(voice_us1_mbrola\)
Having access to separate voices is good as people respond differently to different voices, according to the
situation. The female voice, psychologists tell us, is good for information, issuing help, and reporting text, whereas
humans respond better to commands given by a male voice. Within a household, you might have messages intended
for different people spoken with different voices. If the listener knows the voice that's theirs, it's possible (through a
auditory quirk known as the cocktail party effect ) for them to isolate their voice among a lot of other auxiliary noise,
including other spoken commands.
The default voice (usually kal_diphone or ked_diphone ) is raspy enough that it works well as the final alarm call
of the morning. However, ensure that guests know you're using it, because being woken up by something that's the
cross between Stephen Hawking and a Dalek is quite disconcerting.
As well as simple phrases, you can ask Festival to read files to you either through the following:
say default `cat filename`
$ETAILEDINFULLAT http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169 IFYOUȀDRATHERCOPYANDPASTE