[arm-allstar] Another possibility for local text-to-speech

[Patrick Perdue]

Greetings:

For those of us who want a local, license-free, highly customizable, 
very easy to understand TTS option on Linux, this is worth considering.

https://github.com/dectalk/

As things stand now, it doesn't compile on arm7l, and I'm not smart 
enough to know why. I have compiled and used existing binaries on Debian 
X64, though.

There is a web assembly version you can play with here.

https://webspeak.terminal.ink/

There are no controls on the web interface for things like pitch, rate, 
voice, etc. so to make those changes, you need to be familiar with the 
syntax to pass to the engine, but pretty much everything functions as 
expected when parsed. One thing I particularly like is that it's good at 
alpha-numeric processing upper case. Great for call signs without making 
lots of changes to the text. I'd love to have this on my HamVoIP nodes 
in place of Allison. I have previously been using rendered output from 
the Apple Fred voice, rewriting all the relevant Asterisk prompts for 
app.rpt using a bash script and the say command. This would be great for 
on-the-fly processing of dynamic text, like weather reports and the like 
as well.

There is even a version of the dictionary and ruleset that was used by 
NOAA Weather Radio between 1998 and 2002, before switching to a more 
human sounding concatenated system. They previously used DECtalk.


Just putting this out there for consideration.

73

N2DYI