Linux TTS Service using Amazon Polly

There are 3 components (binaries) in this project:

1. tts-service - a dbus daemon that listens for text to speech commands.
2. say - a tool line tool that sends to tts-service the arguments or the piped input.
3. speak-selection a tool that sends to tts-service the content of the X11 selection.
   You can bind this one to a key shortcut in order to make reading more pleasant.

Requirements

AWS account in order to access the Polly service and an access key that can be used to use it.

Configuration

If you have already an usable access key in your .aws/credentials it would be picked up.
The default region is eu-west-1 you might want to change it to something closer to you.
The default voice is Salli in order to change you'll need to use .config/tts.toml configuration method.

Using .config/tts.toml you can override the credentials and region from .aws/credentials

voice = "<one of the voices from the list excluding the language>"
speack_rate = "x-slow|slow|medium|fast|x-fast"
#more on under the rate attribute https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/supported-ssml.html#prosody-tag
aws_access_key = "a valid aws access key id"
aws_secret_key = "a valid aws secret key"
aws_region = "the aws region to be used"

All the fields are optional.

Running

You can run it as a systemd service but it needs to be under an X11 session or you can start the tts-service using your X11 desktop environment auto start support.
On ubuntu and debian after installing the deb you can run systemclt enable --user tts and systemctl start --user tts after you enable-linger using loginctl for the user that you use in X11.

Voices

Filiz - tr-TR
Astrid - sv-SE
Tatyana - ru-RU
Maxim - ru-RU
Carmen - ro-RO
Inês - pt-PT
Cristiano - pt-PT
Vitória - pt-BR
Ricardo - pt-BR
Maja - pl-PL
Jan - pl-PL
Jacek - pl-PL
Ewa - pl-PL
Ruben - nl-NL
Lotte - nl-NL
Liv - nb-NO
Seoyeon - ko-KR
Takumi - ja-JP
Mizuki - ja-JP
Giorgio - it-IT
Carla - it-IT
Karl - is-IS
Dóra - is-IS
Mathieu - fr-FR
Léa - fr-FR
Céline - fr-FR
Chantal - fr-CA
Penélope - es-US
Miguel - es-US
Enrique - es-ES
Conchita - es-ES
Geraint - en-GB-WLS
Salli - en-US
Matthew - en-US
Kimberly - en-US
Kendra - en-US
Justin - en-US
Joey - en-US
Joanna - en-US
Ivy - en-US
Raveena - en-IN
Aditi - en-IN
Emma - en-GB
Brian - en-GB
Amy - en-GB
Russell - en-AU
Nicole - en-AU
Vicki - de-DE
Marlene - de-DE
Hans - de-DE
Naja - da-DK
Mads - da-DK