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I followed these instructions for how to change the default voice for spd-say from espeak to festival hoping that would allow me to use festival in Chrome with a text-to-speech extension I have installed. At first, the spd-say command would work fine, but the voice was barely understandable. But after going through the above instructions, I can't get spd-say to work.

echo "testing festival" | festival --tts works, and so does espeak "testing espeak", but spd-say "testing festival" gives me the following error:

Failed to connect to Speech Dispatcher:
Error: Can't connect to unix socket /run/user/1000/speech-dispatcher/speechd.sock: 
No such file or directory. Autospawn: Autospawn failed. 
Speech Dispatcher refused to start with error code, stating this as a reason:

What's causing this error? I've checked both files that the above instructions said I needed to modify, and I can't see anything wrong with them. In addition, I've uninstalled and reinstalled speech dispatcher so that the command would successfully use the espeak voice and then went through the instructions again, but I got the same result.

ElliotThomas
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2 Answers2

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Have you tried looking into the logfiles written by speech-dispatcher? You should be able to find them under /run/user/1000/speech-dispatcher/log/.

I ran into a very similar issue. In my case, I had espeak disabled and festival enabled and got the following error in /run/user/1000/speech-dispatcher/log/speech-dispatcher.log:

speechd: ERROR: Module festival failed to initialize. Reason: 
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Communicating with Festival through a socket. Can't connect to Festival server. Check your configuration in etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/festival.conf for the specified host and port and check if Festival is really running there, e.g. with telnet. Please see documentation for more info.
---------------

I noticed that I in fact did not have festival running, which I fixed by running systemctl enable festival and systemctl start festival.

Edit: Although I didn't get it to work with Firefox either, I found that flite is a way more stable and performant alternative to festival while still getting comparable audio quality.

veyvr
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Unfortunately, I have not encounter the exact same problem you are describing myself, but I created a new TTS utility which help you as well. It works offline, for free with AI-based high-quality voice. You can you it everywhere: Firefox browser, PDF reader, chrome, LibreOffice, etc.

Feel free to have a look, I just created a video tutorial with installation steps and DEMO: https://youtu.be/hb1ZVwUcPCU

Download link and Project page: https://github.com/MattePalte/Verbify-TTS

Feel free to leave comment/open issue to discuss new ideas, problems or constructive criticism.

Hoping it will help you.

Matteo Paltenghi
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