On a sunny day (Tue, 10 Mar 2020 11:44:28 +0000) it happened Ahem A Rivet's
Shot  wrote in
:

>On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 10:31:05 GMT
>Jan Panteltje  wrote:
>
>> PS, I just created a solution to all this:
>>
>>   make 2>/dev/stdout | grep -i error | festival --tts
>
>        Oh boy I'll bet it has fun pronouncing filenames. I like it!

Thanks
As to the voices, there are other text to speech solutions for the Pi,
this site I found very nice:
 https://elinux.org/RPi_Text_to_Speech_(Speech_Synthesis)

espeak works here, but I do not like the voice very much.

So I gave the google script there a try.
I must say google wins as far as voices is concerned.

I saved (their) this script as  'gst2'

#!/bin/bash
# tested en nl fr de
say() { local IFS=+;/usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa -really-quiet -noconsolecontrols
"http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$*&tl=en"; }
say $*

it expects something like ./gst2 "this is my text"

As we want to use a stream from stdin I wrote a second script that 'serializes
it', named gst4:

#!/bin/bash
read user_reply
./gst2 "$user_reply"

So gst4 calls gst2


So now
echo "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" | ./gst4
gives a very nice English female voice.

I tried German, French and Dutch too, just change the   tl=en   to  tl=de 
tl=fr  or tl=nl  in the first script.
Works on my laptop and on the Pi4!

Minus point is that you need a net connection for google translate,
and it takes quite a bit of bytes, so if you have a limited data-budget that
maybe a problem.

Was just some experimenting I did last night.
 make 2>/dev/stdout | grep -i error | ./gst4

Could not get 'pico' from that website to work.

I had, on an other old PC, festival working with several languages,
did try to compile some on Pi4, but so far no luck running these (have not
tried very hard).
google translate really impresses me.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05