Zenspeak

You can give this one to children. It makes them noisier.

This one's just a simple interface to either espeak or festival: it asks you what to say via zenity and then says it. It doesn't take any arguments, so you start it up with a simple:

./zenspeak

In summary, it's not exactly dragon magic.

The code:

 
 1 #!/bin/bash 
 2 #  
 3 # Zenspeak 
 4 # 
 5 # Provides a simple graphical (Gtk) interface to a speech production system: 
 6 # either espeak or festival. It's really simple too: you put in some text,  
 7 # the text is spoken. When you put in zero text, the program ends. 
 8 #  
 9 # Parameters: 
10 #   None 
11 # 
12 # Depends: 
13 #   espeak      (apt:espeak) 
14 #   festival    (apt:festival) 
15 #   zenity      (apt:zenity) 
16 # 
17 # Author: 
18 #   Konrad Siek <konrad.siek@gmail.com> 
19 # 
20 # License information: 
21 # 
22 # This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify 
23 # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by 
24 # the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or 
25 # (at your option) any later version. 
26 # 
27 # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, 
28 # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of 
29 # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the 
30 # GNU General Public License for more details. 
31 # 
32 # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License 
33 # along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. 
34 # 
35 # Copyright 2009 Konrad Siek 
36  
37 # System for production of sound is selected by the parameter,  
38 # or the defaut is used if none were specified. 
39 SYSTEM_DEFAULT=espeak
40 SYSTEM=`(( $# == 0 )) && echo "$SYSTEM_DEFAULT" || echo "$1"` 
41 echo $SYSTEM 
42  
43 # System dependent settings for espeak: 
44 espeak_speed=120            # default: 160 
45 espeak_pitch=60             # 0-99, default: 50 
46 espeak_amplitude=20         # 0-20, default: 10 
47 espeak_voide=english        # list of voices: `espeak --voices` 
48 espeak_variant=f2           # m{1,6}, f{1,4} 
49  
50 # I'm completely pants when it comes to setting up festival, so I won't  
51 # even attempt it here. 
52  
53 while true 
54 do 
55     # Show dialog and get user input. 
56     something=`zenity --entry --title="Say something..." --text="Say:"` 
57  
58     # If no user input or cancel: bugger off (and indicate correct result). 
59     if [ -z "$something" ] 
60     then 
61         exit 0 
62     fi 
63  
64     # Put the input through either espeak or festival. 
65     if [ "$SYSTEM" == "espeak" ] 
66     then 
67         # Note: the sound is padded within pulse, so that it can be  
68         # played simultaneously with other sources. 
69         padsp espeak \
70             -a $espeak_amplitude \
71             -p $espeak_pitch \
72             -s $espeak_speed \
73             -v $espeak_voice+$espeak_variant \
74             "$something" 
75     elif [ "$SYSTEM" == "festival" ] 
76     then 
77         # Incidentally, that's all I know about festival. 
78         echo "$something" | festival --tts
79     fi 
80 done 

The code is also available at GitHub as bash/zenspeak.