My Computer related stuff...

ScanSoft RealSpeak 3.51 for Linux

hi,


A small description about the procedure how I installed it (and use it) on my
Debian Sarge system.


I have been demonstrated that the same procedure worked for Ubuntu 6.06.


Here we go.

Install

The scansoft realspeak host 3.51 provides two .rpm files:

• rs-api-<version-stuff>.rpm (for developpers)
  
• rs-<lang>-<version-stuff>.rpm (the language data).
  

The indication <lang> is different for every language-package. Belgian Dutch for instance gives us "dub".


For ease of use (especially installation) on a .deb based system (like debian, ubuntu,...), we convert these packages using alien:

fakeroot alien rs-api-3.51.00.02-1.i386.rpm
fakeroot alien rs-dub-3.51.00.02-1.i386.rpm

Then follows installation:

sudo dpkg -i rs-api_3.51.00.02-2_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i rs-dub_3.51.00.02-2_i386.deb

By this, the ScanSoft (RealSpeak) files are put into /opt/scansoft.


To allow applications to reach the libraries, I added to /etc/ld.so.conf a line:


/opt/scansoft/engine


Followed by execution of sudo /sbin/ldconfig to apply these changes.

Test/Usage

ScanSoft RealSpeak comes with a couple of demos, which can be used to test the functioning. One of them, standard just converts a text into a raw file.

cd /tmp
echo "This is the text I want to be converted to speech by Scansoft." >> text.txt
/opt/scansoft/tts/api/demos/standard 0 0 /opt/scansoft/tts/engine /tmp/text.txt

The values 0 and 0 in the example, select American English (first zero) and a Female voice (second zero). The value(s) corresponding to your language-package might differ.


My system having female flemish (belgian dutch) speaker, uses 14 resp. 0. In the code-directory of rs-api, you'll find the correct values. Read /opt/scansoft/tts/api/inc/lh_ttsso.h to find the corresponding values.

Look for a line like:

#define TTS_LANG_<YOURLANGUAGE> <number>

that will give you the language number.


Above code snippet will write in the /tmp directory a file called standard.pcm. This file can be auditioned using:


play --type=raw --channels=1 --rate=8000 -s -2 --endian=little standard.pcm

play is provided by the sox package.
I used a version d.d. 2007-01-31. (version 13.0.0-1).

For an older version (Debian ETCH uses sox 12.17.9-1), you could try:

play -t raw -c 1 -r 8000 -f s -s w standard.pcm


or you could install the alsa-utils-package, and use aplay:

aplay --type=raw --channels=1 --rate=8000 --format=S16_LE standard.pcm

You even might want to convert the audio-file to an mp3-file:

lame -r -m m -s 8 -x standard.pcm standard.mp3



Note that the last 3 seconds of the audio might not be played. This seems to have something to do with the rudimentary way of playing them. Use another player and it might work as expected.

Labels: linux, Nuance, ScanSoft RealSpeak, TTS

posted by Dieter @ 19:36