Comments on: Introducing Flite: A Voice Synthesis System That Really Works With Asterisk@Home

By: Int21

Int21 — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:12:15 +0000

Is there a way to use loquendo voices with asterisk step-by-step to be disponible to us!

I’m searching a long time about it and no have sucess yet.

Please, if someone know the way post here please.

Thanks a lot!

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:03:23 +0000

The author has updated the SVN version to handle Asterisk 1.4. On my Fedora Core 5 system, I just did:

yum get flite flite-devel
svn co https://dialogpalette.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dialogpalette dialogpalette
cd dialogpalette/trunk/asterisk-flite
make
make install

Reload asterisk and it works!

[WM: Great news! Thanks.]

By: Niall

Niall — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:29:36 +0000

Same as Wolf, has anyone got this working on 1.4.x or know of a good alternative solution besides Festival?

I’m getting "loader.c: Module ‘app_flite.so’ did not register itself during load" as an error following the instructions above.

Thanks.

[WM: You might try sending the developer a note and then post his response. Yet another reason not to jump too quickly to Asterisk 1.4.]

By: knasher

knasher — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:40:41 +0000

I converted the .rpm files into .deb files using Alien and they work great on my Asterisk 1.2 installation.

By: Wolf

Wolf — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 14:48:05 +0000

Anyone able to get this to work with Asterisk 1.4.x?

By: toast

toast — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:28:50 +0000

Looks great. For those that run Asterisk on machines other than
linux-i386, would it be possible to post tar.gz of the source code,
the voice part either complete or as a set of patches for flite?

[WM: Contact the author. I’m sure he’ll be happy to provide you anything that’s available.]

By: Victor

Victor — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:18:45 +0000

Flite works with English voices, but for spanish we are left mum… Is there a spanish voice for Flite?; If not, could you please post instructions on how to enable Festival again on Trixbox 1.2.3 using a spanish voice. Thanks for all your support !!!

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:16:51 +0000

In answer to some questions above. I just installed this on the latest Asterisk At Home 2.8 and it works. Trixbox should also work as I think trixbox has the same backend, eg same asterisk and agi code engine but just has a different HTML front end. As this Flite module seems to plug directly into Asterisk it should work, I can’t see why it wouldn’t. Again as re-assurance the install files are RPM’s so if it goes wrong use rpm -e to remove it. Basically the reverse of installing it.

cd /root
rpm -e flite-1.3-1.aah.i386.rpm
rpm -e app_flite-0.3-1.aah.i386.rpm
amportal stop
amportal start

That should do the trick.

[WM: Flite comes preinstalled with TrixBox, but you’ve definitely got the drill down. Thanks.]

By: rob

rob — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 16:08:28 +0000

anyway to integrate this with trixbox directory? i had a request that the directory be able to "read" names rather than spell them. R-O-B-SPACE-R-O-T-H is slow and not as professional as just saying "ROB ROTH".

By: Steven

Steven — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:18:30 +0000

Has anyone been able to get this to work using php? I found a php wrapper for flite that a guy wrote, but so far have had no luck compiling it.

[WM: Take a look at the weather, news, and email reader scripts on our site. All of them use PHP and Flite.]

By: Kotek

Kotek — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:13:34 +0000

Does anyone tried to implement RealSpeak with Asterisk? Any how to or generic steps to follow?

By: Izzy

Izzy — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:56:39 +0000

Does anyone know if this also works with the lastest trixbox v1.2? In the article it stated up to Asterisk v2.8. Makes me kinda nervous, because I spent a lot of time configuring Asterisk; I dont wanna mess it up (at least not now). [WM: Read the lead article on Nerd Vittles for the "why" but the short answer is that trixbox 1.2 will blow Flite out of the water. TrixBox 1.1 works fine together with the un-TrixBox tips in the comments of the article.]

By: Davy Chan

Davy Chan — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 04:31:46 +0000

flite.conf. Format:
[general]
;usecache=yes|no ; Default is no
;cachedir=/some/directory ; Default if usecase=yes is /tmp

You could just create an empty file in /etc/asterisk to quiet app_flite if you are sick of the warning messages.

See ya…

d.c.

By: Wayne

Wayne — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 22:31:08 +0000

Hi, I would also like to ask about the ‘flite.conf’ file being missing. I’ve done a little googleing and come up with nothing and, as was posted, flite says it cant find the flite.conf file.
Must say though – the ‘less than 15 mins’ to install and configure seems a bit long! – or are youall using 14.4k modem to download 🙂 (had to be less than 5 mins to setup)

Cheers
Wayne.

[WM: Info on Flite is hard to come by. Perhaps after Carnegie Mellon gets back to work, we can get someone to respond to an email. Glad you had an easy time getting things working. That was the idea.]

By: Corey DeLasaux

Corey DeLasaux — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:37:33 +0000

Just a note that it is easy to change the location of the sound files to /tmp for the weather.agi no cron needed. Edit the to following lines (I have had mine this way for the past year and no issues): my $sounddir = "/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/tts"; ---> my $sounddir = "/tmp"; $AGI->stream_file('tts/'.basename($wavefile,".wav"),1); ---> $AGI->stream_file($sounddir.'/'.basename($wavefile,".wav"),1); Now all those files are in /tmp Cheers, Corey

By: Cliff

Cliff — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:18:17 +0000

I like the idea of being able to read out emails…… However – could anyone suggest a way to get TrixBox to connect to a Filemaker database, and have Flite read data from that? We run a service co. and it would be great if clients could ring up, enter their job number on their phone keypad, and get a status report read to them directly from our database…. Any ideas?

Cheers

By: Gene

Gene — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 23:07:06 +0000

The app_flite source can be found on Francois’s site: http://dialogpalette.sourceforge.net/download.html

Working great for me on Ubuntu Breezy with the standard flite 1.2 package. ‘apt-get install flite flite1-dev’, then edit app_flite’s Makefile. On line 46, add ‘-I/usr/include/flite’ to the includes

By: Frank Hieber

Frank Hieber — Sat, 20 May 2006 15:21:16 +0000

Another option that might be nice using Flite would be if we had a web page that users could go to and enter announcements or "broadcast messages". Then people could call an extension and it would read the message to the caller(s) You could have departmental broadcast messages (ie Sales/Engineering/Company Wide) or schools could use it to handle snow delay/closure announcements, homework lists by class, the possibilities are endless. Unfortunately, I’m not smart enough to know how to program this, but I AM smart enough to know that this would be useful! If we could just make it a generic enough framework so that people could figure out how to drop output from other applications into it it would make it more versatile. Monitor an email account, calendar, weather, facility temperature readings, hard drive space, students grades and attendance…the list is endless.

[WM: Great ideas, Frank. We’ll tackle some of these … after the move.]

By: Olaf Rabbachin

Olaf Rabbachin — Fri, 19 May 2006 08:04:02 +0000

Also thanks from here for your great articles. My question: would it be possible for the RSS-feed to not use a poster’s name ("by: [name]") as the subject but rather the article’s title? That would sure help finding interesting ones easier.

By: Ronald L. Gibson

Ronald L. Gibson — Thu, 18 May 2006 19:39:05 +0000

It came up with this error, so I installed from a different directory from /root
[root@asterisk1 ~]# rpm -ihv flite-1.3-1.aah.i386.rpm
error: flite-1.3-1.aah.i386.rpm: MD5 digest: BAD Expected(a0349d9a42e99e10455401a4705122c4) != (2e5b3266bacc476ed5b9251a01db46f4)
error: flite-1.3-1.aah.i386.rpm cannot be installed

[WM: Either the download failed (most likely) or you weren’t logged in as root.]

By: Brodie

Brodie — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:29:42 +0000

On a different note, did you guys notice that Skype announced that they will provide free pstn calls till the end of the year? Any tutorials out there on how to link up Asterisk with Skype?

By: Peter Meuser

Peter Meuser — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:28:27 +0000

Great article like all your others about AAH!

Yesterday I build up a new system with Flite following your description and it just runs like a dream. Today I found this article:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/domino-php/

Now I dreaming of letting Asterisk and Flite read my just arrived mail (I know, Lotus Domino is not an open source child, but also not that far away from being as the folks at http://www.openntf.org show).

Maybe there is an php and Domino programmer out there?

I know the Lotus side very well, but now first have to learn PHP…

Greetings from the south of Germany,
Peter

[WM: Reading email is definitely on our radar. Not sure we can help with Notes Mail, but I’ll do a little checking around for you.]

By: Ward

Ward — Sun, 14 May 2006 18:05:56 +0000

For those looking for the original CMU tar.gz file, here’s the location:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/packed/flite-1.3/

By: Steven Andrews

Steven Andrews — Sat, 13 May 2006 23:28:14 +0000

Also, if it keeps reading the "that concludes..." line in the old voice, just change "That" to "This"; it seems to be caching the audio files it builds; which, come to think of it may be the the reason for the first line too and not necessarily an 80 char limit.