I have moved from windows to Ubuntu recently and I'm still working on building my environment, and so far, I'm enjoying it a lot. I frequently use the Narrator from Firefox and the default Ubuntu TTS doesn't sound good to my ears, so I was researching and found this post. As I was able to install MaryTTS without issues, I'm providing details of my experience in case it is useful for anybody:
- Download the latest version of MaryTTS installer (marytts-installer-5.2.zip) from here.
- Install Java, I followed the Digital Ocean guide and installed the latest version (11 I guess) but MaryTTS installer didn't work, so I had to uninstall it and install v8 as indicated in the reference above.
- Unzip the installer file and start the installation with
./marytts install
. It downloaded a lot of files and took a lot of time, so be patient.
- Start MaryTTS server running
./marytts -i
. This will show some output on the console. You will know the server is ready when seeing INFO marytts.server Waiting for client to connect on port 59125
. It takes some time to finish, and this might be discouraging since it seems to be heavy in processing and space used on your system.
- Test the server by opening
http://localhost:59125/
in your web browser and play with the examples provided.
I tried to configure speech-dispatcher
(the engine that enables TTS on Linux) with MaryTTS but it seems this is not supported in my current Ubuntu version (18.04). I could see the configuration module is available for Ubuntu 20.04, so perhaps I will give it a try when I do the upgrade.
I have ended configuring STT with festival
which works OK with Firefox for Spanish and English voices. If interested in know how to do it, check this post.