Re: Any Progress on an AI Related Screen-Reader?

On 8/8/25 13:04, Aaron Chantrill wrote:
>
> On 8/8/25 10:27, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>> The documented way: a module specific to the synth, which knows how to
>> drive it in a more controlled way than just executing a command.
>>
>> Samuel
>>
> I haven't seen a module specific for piper-tts yet. You are saying 
> there is one? And it should be installed in the 
> /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules directory?
>
> I did a search and don't see it. Do I need to enable another repository?
>
> $ sudo apt-file search .conf | grep '/etc/speech-dispatcher'
> ...
> speech-dispatcher: /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/flite.conf
> ...
>
> Thank you, -Aaron
>
I do note that flite is on this list. Flite is a very good and 
lightweight tts engine based on Festival. Its delivery is rather flat, 
but it uses the same set of arctic voices that I downloaded in my piper 
examples and I still consider it a huge improvement on espeak-ng, and 
since there is already a module for it, it should be fairly 
straightforward to set up.

I've also seen a lot of comments about how it is inefficient to run a 
separate instance of piper for each request, and how it makes more sense 
to run a piper service where the onnx model only gets loaded once. I see 
that there is an http server included with the piper source code. I'm 
going to try running that and using the generic driver to send requests 
to the instance, unless there is a better module available.