Simple TTS

A simple machine learning text-to-speech program for your terminal. Hear text read aloud by realistic voices; from a file or your clipboard.

Motivation

Text-to-speech is not always supported in many digital platforms out there. The quality is also not consistent.

Having Simple TTS run on the terminal and locally on my machine provides a cozy and private environment I feel safe to use.

This is especially useful for the days when I don't have the mental energy to go through the many written communication or resources I have to, and a little push is needed.

Features

Terminal-first user experience
Many realistic voices available
Use any length of text
Saved raw audio files in sensible chunks
Use copied text as input
Utilize different GPUs as accelerator — Intel architecture supported!

Requirements

Simple TTS is in early development, and not packaged or distributed yet for any particular operating system. Please read on to see the tested environment under which I am developing & using it:

This is currently only tested working on Debian or Ubuntu-based distros.
GPU accelerators make the program run faster, but you need to have updated drivers for your device that PyTorch requires. However, it will still run fine on CPUs, just slower (up to 2x longer or more).
The following are required packages aside from the python dependencies. espeak-ng is used under the hood as a fallback engine for English languages, and libvlc is used as the default audio player for the generated audio.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install vlc espeak-ng

Note

Installing vlc via flatpak or snap will not work, as the code need access to libvlc.

Setup

Clone repo and go into the directory

git clone https://git.ayo.run/ayo/simple-tts
cd simple-tts

Create new Python virtual environment. Here I use conda, but venv is also good.

conda create -n tts

### (optional) for Intel XPU specific device usage:
conda create -n tts --clone llm-pt26

Note

Optional for using Intel XPUs, you need to set up ipex-llm environment with pytorch 2.6. Also, see Intel XPU environmental variables" section below.

Activate the environment and install the dependencies

conda activate tts
pip install -r requirements.txt

Language-specific dependencies

There are language-specific python dependencies. For example, if you will use Chinese voices (see voices usage), please install the requirements requirements-zh.txt ... supporting more languages is still a work in progress.

pip install -r requirements-zh.txt

## then you can use zh-prefixed voices for Chinese texts:
python tts.py -v zf_xiaoni "事实胜于雄辩"

Intel XPU environmental variables (Optional)

For XPUs, we need to set some environmental variables. I have added a env.sh script which will activate the conda environment tts and set the environmental variables.

. env.sh

Usage

Go into the directory and activate the environment:

cd simple-tts
conda activate tts

If using Intel XPUs, set the env variables

. env.sh

Running the program without arguments will use the demo text tongue-twister.txt with the default voice.

python tts.py # will use default arguments

Providing text inputs

You can pass a string as first argument:

python tts.py "Hello world!" # will be read by the default voice

To run the program with an input file, use flag --input_file.

python tts.py --input_file demo/tongue-twister.txt

# or shorter...
python tts.py -i demo/tongue-twister.txt

You can also use the text stored in your clipboard (i.e., copied text). Select a text from anywhere (e.g., your web browser), copy it with <ctrl>+C or the context menu, then use the flag --clipboard:

python tts.py --clipboard

# or shorter...
python tts.py -c

Labeling your outputs

You can indicate a title to be used as label (i.e., file name prefix and directory name) to the generated outputs using --title

# This will put the generated files in ./outputs/simple-greeting/
python tts.py "Hello there!" --title "simple-greeting"
ls ./outputs/simple-greeting

# or shorter
python tts.py "Hello there! and Hi!" -t "simple-greetings"
ls ./outputs/simple-greetings

Voices

Optionally, you can indicate a voice you want to use with the --voice flag. See all voices available.

python tts.py --voice am_michael

# or shorter...
python tts.py -v am_michael

There are four shortcuts available to the best voices: pro, hot, asmr, brit (i.e., best trained voices), and pro is the default if no value is given

python tts.py "Hello there!" --voice pro # af_heart

python tts.py "Hello there!" --voice hot # af_bella

python tts.py "Hello there!" --voice asmr # af_nicole

python tts.py "Hello there!" --voice brit # bf_emma

Disable audio player

You can disable the built-in audio player with --skip_play if you choose to play the audio files generated with your preferred player.

python tts.py "Hello there!" --voice asmr --skip_play

# or shorter...
python tts.py "Hello there!" --voice asmr -s

Advanced usages

The --verbose flag can be used to show more informative messages.

python tts.py --verbose

The --device or -d flag can be used to set the desired device (i.e., processor) to use:

python tts.py --device cpu # will use the cpu
python tts.py --device cuda # will use the NVIDIA GPU
python tts.py --device xpu # will use the Intel GPU