espeak-cgi's Introduction

espeak-cgi

This CGI script (written in Tcl) is a wrapper around espeak-ng tool. It is useful if you need a TTS engine for your web app and you want to host it yourself, right on your server.

SCRIPT DOES NOT WORK ON WINDOWS

Installation on RedHat Enterprise 8

Downlad and install ActiveTcl 8.6 from ActiveState into /opt/ActiveTcl-8.6: http://downloads.activestate.com/ActiveTcl/releases/8.6.9.0/

Copy over say.tcl to /var/www/cgi-bin, then chmod it to make it executable.

Obviously, also install espeak-ng (it is already preinstalled if you have GNOME installed).

Usage

The script accepts the following arguments:

text=[text encoded in base64] - specifies the text to speak. The value must be the base64 of the string with + replaced with - and / replaced with _ (http base64). Useful if you are trying to speak text the language of which is other than English.
textp=[English text] - specifies the text to speak. It is not needed to convert it to base64. However, the specified text must be in English, otherwise, this won’t work.
voice=[voice] - specifies the voice to use. Default value is en-us.
pitch=[number from 0 to 100] - specifies espeak pitch. Default value is 78.

The script throws only two types of HTTP errors - 200 and 500. When 200 is returned, this means that everything is fine and the resulting wav file is returned. Otherwise, the text of the error is returned.

Example

Contents of index.html:

<script>
function sayHi() {
	let txt = document.getElementById('tbox').value;
	let base = btoa(txt).replace('+', '-').replace('/', '_');
	new Audio('/cgi-bin/say.tcl?text=' + txt + '&v=en-us').play()
}
</script>
<p>Type something: <input type=text id=tbox /></p>
<button onclick="sayHi()">Say it</button>