Fall Festivus: Asterisk Text-to-Speech Roundup with a Baker’s Dozen New Voices

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It’s been a while since we looked at the text-to-speech (TTS) landscape with Asterisk®. So we thought we’d bring you up to date on where we stand with text-to-speech in the free department insofar as Asterisk 11 is concerned. The hands-down winner remains Lefteris Zafiris’ implementation of Google TTS. It rivals any commercial TTS software application and costs you nothing. The good news is, if you’re running Incredible PBX 11, you already have it. For other PBX in a Flash systems, start with our previous Nerd Vittles tutorial to get Google TTS installed. For other systems, start with the Lefteris Zafiris tutorial. Once everything is installed, copy the perl script to /usr/local/sbin and make a temporary directory to hold your Google TTS recordings:

cp /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/googletts-cli.pl /usr/local/sbin/googletts-cli.pl
mkdir /tmp/tts
cd /tmp/tts


For each recording you wish to create, use the following syntax where hello.wav is the name for your new file and "Hello world" is the text you wish to convert to a sound file:

googletts-cli.pl -o hello.wav -l en -t "Hello world"

Next, convert the .wav file into a .gsm file that is compatible with Asterisk and move it into place for use with Asterisk:

sox hello.wav -r 8000 -c1 hello.gsm
mv hello.gsm /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom

To convert the file into an MP3 for your cellphone or a silly web site like ours, it goes like this:

lame -h -b 64 "hello.wav" "hello.mp3"

Now you can use the recording in your Asterisk dialplan like this:

exten => 1234,n,Playback(custom/hello)

To use the recorded voice prompts in FreePBX®, you first must copy them to your desktop computer. Then, in FreePBX, choose Admin -> System Recordings. Pick the file on your desktop and click Upload. Give the recording a name and then click Save. The recordings then are available for use in your IVRs, Ring Groups, and Announcements.

To create Google TTS prompts on-the-fly in your dialplan, use the following syntax:

exten => 1234,n,agi(googletts.agi,"Hello world.")

If you need help, take a look at PIAF Forum thread covering Google TTS and build some terrific applications for you and your customers. It’s the ultimate freebie!

Today we also want to explore what else is out there besides Flite and Google TTS. Festival and its little brother, Flite, have been staples of the PBX in a Flash and Incredible PBX projects since the outset. The problem has always been the lack of voices. The good news is that now there are at least some choices with Festival. To use these new voices with Asterisk in PBX in a Flash and Incredible PBX, you’ll first need to crank up Festival. From the command prompt, type: festival –server &. If you’d prefer to start up Festival when your server boots, then issue the following command and reboot:

echo "festival --server &" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

To download and install the new voices, we’ll need the RPMForge repository. If you’re using a 32-bit system, issue the following commands to activate it:

If you’re running a 64-bit system, issue the following commands:

Now let’s add some voices to your server. You can find out what’s available by issuing one of the following commands:

yum search festvox
yum search festival

To install some new voices for you to play with, issue the following commands:

yum -y install festvox-rms-arctic-hts.noarch
yum -y install festvox-kal-diphone.noarch
yum -y install festvox-ked-diphone.noarch
yum -y install festvox-jmk-arctic-hts.noarch
yum -y install festvox-clb-arctic-hts.noarch
yum -y install festvox-awb-arctic-hts.noarch
yum -y install festvox-bdl-arctic-hts.noarch
yum -y install hispavoces-pal-diphone.noarch
yum -y install hispavoces-sfl-diphone.noarch

For a list of your installed voices for Festival, issue the following command:

echo "(voice.list)" | festival --interactive

• kal_diphone
• ked_diphone
• nitech_us_clb_arctic_hts
• nitech_us_jmk_arctic_hts
• nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts
• nitech_us_rms_arctic_hts
• nitech_us_bdl_arctic_hts
• nitech_us_awb_arctic_hts
• JuntaDeAndalucia_es_sf_diphone
• JuntaDeAndalucia_es_pa_diphone

To use Festival voices in your dial plan, you’ll need the name of the voice you wish to use with a prefix of voice_. So, for example, the kal_diphone voice would be voice_kal_diphone. You can control the volume of the voice prompts by (gradually) adjusting the scale. Then the dialplan syntax looks like this:

exten => 1234,n,System(echo "Hello." | text2wave -eval "(voice_kal_diphone)" -scale 1.0 -F 8000 -o /tmp/${UNIQUEID}.wav)
exten => 1234,n,Playback(/tmp/${UNIQUEID})
exten => 1234,n,System(rm -f /tmp/${UNIQUEID}.wav)


We have a third option for you today. eSpeak for Asterisk is brought to you by none other than Lefteris Zafiris. If you haven’t already figured it out, Lefteris has single-handedly kept Asterisk text-to-speech humming along for years. We all owe him our deepest appreciation. Thank you, Lefteris!

eSpeak is a terrific TTS platform because it supports literally dozens of foreign languages. It’s still hard for some Americans to grasp the idea that the whole world doesn’t speak English so here’s an app for the Restivus. Lefteris is a Debian devotee so it takes a little elbow grease to get this one going on the CentOS platform with PBX in a Flash or Incredible PBX. If you can cut-and-paste commands, then this shouldn’t be too difficult; however, we don’t recommend this version for production use.¹ After logging into your server as root, make certain that you’ve enabled the RPMForge repo as explained above. Then issue the following commands to install eSpeak and eSpeak for Asterisk:

yum -y install portaudio-devel
yum -y install libsndfile-devel
yum -y install libsamplerate-devel
yum -y install espeak
yum -y install espeak-devel

cd /usr/src
git clone git://github.com/zaf/Asterisk-eSpeak
cd Asterisk-eSpeak
make
make install
make samples
cd /etc/asterisk
mv espeak.conf espeak.conf.orig
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/espeak.conf
chown asterisk:asterisk *.conf
amportal restart


Once eSpeak is loaded, the dialplan syntax for eSpeak TTS looks like this:

exten => 1234,n,Espeak("Welcome to the new world.",any,en-us)
exten => 1234,n,Espeak("Bienvenido al nuevo mundo.",any,es-la)


For the list of eSpeak language abbreviations, issue the following command: espeak --voices.

So… where do we go from here? Hopefully, MBROLA and Festival MBROLA are next in line. The Debian methodology has already been documented. Who would like to tackle a CentOS tutorial?

Important Final Step. Once you’ve finished installing your new TTS apps and voices, don’t forget to turn off the RPMForge repo. There are many apps in the repo that will do irreparable damage to your PBX in a Flash server if it attempts to update a component from the wrong repository! Just issue the following command to disable the RPMForge repo until you need it again. Enjoy!

sed -i 's|enabled = 1|enabled = 0|' /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

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Originally published: Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.

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