[First disclaimer - I searched before I posted this]
I am wondering if anyone has played with the available voice variants for Google TTS?
According to this site:
Now we?re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer, eSpeak.
Following that link to:
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html
You can see that it offers voice variants… just wondering if anyone has tried this on Google TTS? if it works, has anyone thought about modifying the Sonos plugin to accept this additional argument?
Thanks!
The ouput file of eSpeak is a WAV file; that is a problem for Sonos.
But a TTS server could certainly be created based on eSpeak. It should include in addition to eSpeak a WAV to MP3 converter + a HTTP server.
Maybe it is possible to install eSpeak in the Vera itself ? But one time again, the lack of a MP3 output will be a problem for Sonos.
Something that could be interesting: http://lua-espeak.luaforge.net/#intro
lolodomo - the lua library does look interesting… especially this bit:
espeak.SetVoiceByProperties(voice_spec)
An voice table is used to pass criteria to select a voice. Any of the
following fields may be set:
name nil or a voice name
languages nil or a single language string (with optional dialect), eg.
“en-uk”, or “en”
gender 0 or nil = not specified, 1 = male, 2 = female
age 0 or nil = not specified, or an age in years
variant After a list of candidates is produced, scored and sorted,
“variant” is used to index that list and choose a voice.
variant=0 takes the top voice (i.e. best match), variant=1
takes the next voice, etc
Return: espeak.EE_OK: operation achieved
espeak.EE_BUFFER_FULL: the command can not be buffered; you may
try to call the function again after a while.
espeak.EE_INTERNAL_ERROR.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any real programming… could be fun to get this package installed and see what can come of it…
Did you listen eSpeak voices ?
The quality looks very poor compared to Google.
Strange - I hand’t but it says that Google is based on eSpeak. But perhaps that’s just from an algorithm perspective and that Google maybe used different vocal tracks to create the sounds… sigh! Digging for more info on the Google specific API.
This is all new to me so I don’t yet understand all of the components of this stuff 
Learning is fun!