Ruby Flite

Ruby Flite is a small speech synthesis library for ruby using CMU Flite.

CMU Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast run-time synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers. Flite is designed as an alternative synthesis engine to Festival for voices built using the FestVox suite of voice building tools.

Supported versions

• ruby 2.0.0 and uppper
• CMU Flite 1.4 and 2.0.

Installation

Install CMU Flite and (optionally) LAME.

On ubuntu

sudo apt-get install flite1-dev
sudo apt-get install libmp3lame-dev # for mp3 support (optionally)

On redhat

yum install flite-devel
yum install libmp3lame-devel # for mp3 support (optionally)

On Windows You have no need to install CMU Flite and LAME if you use ruby 2.0.x, 2.1.x or 2.2.x distributed by rubyinstaller.org. Binary gems for the rubies include them. If you use other ruby versions, you need to install CMU Flite, LAME and Development Kit.

Others You need to install them by yourself.

And then execute:

$ gem install flite

Ruby Flite tries to link with all voices and languages. If you want to reduce dependent libraries, execute the followings instead of above command.

$ gem install flite -- --with-voices=kal --with-langs=eng

Examples

require 'flite'

# Speak "Hello World!"
"Hello World!".speak

# Create a wav data and save as "hello_world.wav"
File.binwrite("hello_world.wav", "Hello World!".to_speech)

# Create a mp3 data and save as "hello_world.mp3"
# This works if mp3 support is enabled.
File.binwrite("hello_world.mp3", "Hello World!".to_speech(:mp3))

# Change the voice used for String#speak and String#to_speech
Flite.default_voice = 'rms'

# Speak again
"Hello World!".speak

See:

• http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/flite/Flite/Voice
• http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/flite/String

Sample Applications

saytime - talking clock

This is inspired by saytime - talking clock for SPARCstations.

Example:

Talk the current time once:

saytime

Talk the current time forever:

saytime --loop

Talk the current time 5 times

saytime --loop 5

Talk the current time 5 times with 10 second intervals

saytime --loop 5 --interval 10

speaking-web-server - Web server replying synthesized speech

Usage:

Start a web server:

speaking-web-server

Open a browser and access:

http://HOSTNAME_OR_IP_ADDRESS:9080
(Change HOSTNAME_OR_IP_ADDRESS.)

Click 'Play' buttons.

Restrictions

• Ruby process doesn't terminate while talking.

• When an error occurs in CMU Flite, the error message is outputted to the standard error.

• When a fatal error occurs in CMU Flite, the error message is outputted to the standard error and the process is terminated. (CMU Flite calls exit(-1)...)

NEWS

0.1.1

• The exception class name Flite::Runtime was renamed to to Flite::RuntimeError.
• Binary gems for Windows bundle precompiled extension libraries for ruby 2.2.1.

0.1.0

Almost methods were changed. Especially {String#to_speech} returns WAV audio data instead of speaking. Use {String#speak} to speak a text.

License

• Ruby Flite is licensed under 2-clause BSD-style license.
• CMU Flite bundled in Windows binary gems is licensed under BSD-like license. See http://www.festvox.org/flite/download.html
• LAME bundled in Windows binary gems is licensed under LGPL.

Related Works

• flite4r - Flite for Ruby (GPL)
• FestivalTTS4r - Festival Text-To-Speech for Ruby

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/kubo/ruby-flite/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request