pico2wave

text-to-speech synthesizer using the SVOX Pico engine

TLDR

Convert text to a WAV file using default language (en-US)

$ pico2wave -w [output.wav] "[Hello world]"

Specify a language for synthesis

$ pico2wave --lang [de-DE] -w [output.wav] "[Hallo Welt]"

Synthesize French text

$ pico2wave -l fr-FR -w [output.wav] "[Bonjour le monde]"

Synthesize text read from a file

$ pico2wave -w [output.wav] "$(cat [input.txt])"

Synthesize and play immediately

$ pico2wave -w /tmp/speech.wav "[text]" && aplay /tmp/speech.wav

SYNOPSIS

pico2wave [options] -w wavfile text

pico2wave is a text-to-speech synthesizer using the SVOX Pico engine. It converts text supplied on the command line into a WAV audio file. The output is always 16-bit mono PCM at 16 kHz. Six languages are supported.

PARAMETERS

-w, --wave file

Output WAV file path (required).

-l, --lang lang

Language code (default: en-US). See LANGUAGES section for supported values.

LANGUAGES

$ en-US  - English (US)
en-GB  - English (UK)
de-DE  - German
es-ES  - Spanish
fr-FR  - French
it-IT  - Italian

CAVEATS

Only six languages are supported. Output format is WAV only; use ffmpeg or sox to convert to other formats. Part of the libttspico-utils package. Text must be passed as a command-line argument, not via stdin.

HISTORY

Pico TTS was developed by SVOX and released as open source for Android, later packaged for Linux.