[Noisebridge-discuss] (Good) Linux text to speech

[Rubin Abdi]

I'm wondering if there's anyone here who's gotten good sounding text to
speech in Linux working?

Back story: I've been using Google's TTS engine that's behind Google
Translate to give Pegasus (the tiny server running in the space) a voice.
It's basically a URL that I hit, throw in the text and they return with a
wave file. It was working great and sounded excellent. However Google is
now throwing up a Captcha in order to get the wave file if you're not going
through Google Translate. You can try it here...

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello%20how%20are%20you?

I could try to hack it and get around the Captcha, but honestly it would be
more excellent if Pegasus just did the speaking itself and people wouldn't
constantly ask me if we're getting sponsored by Google (though Google does
do matching donations for any of its employees, donate now!).

The best I've done so far as been to get espeak to not sound like a robot
fucking my ear, now it just sounds like a robot...

espeak -ven-us+f4 -s130

So, have have you gotten something like Festival or espeak to sound good?
My requirements are...

- Free open source software
- It needs to run on Debian
- If there's some language file I need to download, it's ok if the license
allows it, but I don't want to pay for something
- I don't want to run a Mac or OS X
- Android doesn't count

Can you help? Thanks!

-- 
Rubin
rubin at starset.net
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