This is a text to speech speaker for ASL3. It uses the piper open source TTS system that is not depending on cloud providers and has opensource voice models for dozens of languages.
usage: asl-tts -n NODE -t "TEXT" [ -v VOICE ] [ -f FILE ]
asl-tts uses the piper-tts text to speech engine to generate ulaw files from text so that Asterisk/apt_rpt can speak any set of arbitrary text without needing to have a sound file installed for the word necessary.
By default, asl-tts will cause app_rpt to immediately speak whatever text was specified. To create the text for other usage, such as cron jobs, use the "-f FILE" option to specify where the file should be created. Do not use an extension; the file will be automatically appended with the .ul postfix.
Running the piper-tts system takes a few seconds to compile the voice into the sound file. Larger text blocks may take tens of seconds to compile.
Note that temporary files are written to /tmp/asl-tts/ and are not automatically cleaned up because it's impossible to know when Asterisk will actually need/speak the file contents. If this becomes a problem, put in a systemd timer unit or a cron job to delete old files in /tmp/asl-tts.
By default, the package provides on voice "Amy" from https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/blob/master/VOICES.md. It is possible to download other voices, for any language, and store the .onnx and .onxx.json file in /var/lib/piper-tts and then use them with the -v option. For example, to add the English en_GB voice alan from the voices repository:
-
Download the .onnx and .onnx.json file to /var/lib/piper-tts
-
Specify "-v en_GB-alan-low.onnx" on the command line to asl-tts.
Note, since all files are squashed down to 8K uLaw format, there is no value in the "medium" or "high" quality models. Always use the low quality model.
asl-tts -n 1999 -t "Good morning" will speak "Good morning" over
the system.
More complex message can be created with additional shell coding. As an example here's how the current public IP address of the system could be obtained and spoken:
IPADDR=$(wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.com | grep -Po "[\d\.]+")
MSG="The time is ${IPADDR}"
asl-tts -n 1999 -t ${MSG}
Report bugs to https://github.com/AllStarLink/asl3-tts/issues
Copyright (C) 2024 Jason McCormick and AllStarLink under the terms of the MIT License.