I’ve got an old linux laptop running with Festival installed (a free TTS program). I can make it listen on a port, and speak any text that is sent to the port.
I’ve got an Elk M1 and have speakers for the ELK voice announcements all over the house. A simple modification gives me a line-in and I can pipe whatever I want through the speakers. I really like the voice announcements my ELK gives me, but you’re limited to a 500 word vocabulary. Adding TTS capability to the Vera would allow me to move most of the automation from the ELK over to the Vera, and with better quality voices.
How hard would it be to make a plugin that would allow you to send a string of text to a TCP or UDP socket?
Here’s a demo of it with different voices. Try Anna:
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/onlinedemo.html
I guess people have it running on Raspberry Pi, but it looks like orders for those are taking months. My other thought was to use the built-in TTS capability on Android, and use an old phone I have to write an app that listens on a socket and speaks anything sent to it, and then just stick it permanently in my security panel. And, with Android, there are a ton of downloadable voices available.
But, I’ve got the laptop now, and festival is available as a Ubuntu package.
So, how hard would it be to write a simple plugin that sent a text string over a socket?