Google TTS

1

Hello.

I have an issue, and so far I’m not finding any help online, so here I go:

I have setup Google TTS on my FreePBX 12.0.76.2 Asterisk 11.18.0 but I’m getting no audio returned.

AGI Script googletts.agi completed, returning 0’

Anyone with any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Also, on a side note/question:
I’m going to have a project where the PBX is going to have to play callers data that has been parsed from a webpage. I don’t see any documentation of having a TTS engine reading a text file or perhaps a webpage and returning the data. Can anyone guide me to any sort of documentation so I can start to get my hands dirty.

Thank you

2

https://www.google.com?q=asterisk%20text%20to%20speech

GoogleTTS is a hack and should not be used. The fact that you have to jump through hoops means it is not meant to be used in this manner.

There are plenty of articles that discus text to speech and Asterisk. There are many levels of TTS from robotic sounding to natural sounding. The ones that sound more natural cost money typically. The googleTTS thing breaks often and some would assume that is on purpose because it is again not intended to be used with your PBX or with anything outside of google translate.

3

Thanks for the response. I actually thought so since I didn’t get much too far with a couple lab installs of Google TTS.

Can you point me to any documentation of TTS being able to read text from a file?

4

“Flite” is the TTS app that comes with the system. For commercial TTS, I’ve used Cepstral at
www.cepstral.com with good results.

The only thing tricky is setting up the system to read back your speech file. Other than that, flite, cepstral, and several others all work reasonably well.

5

Cepstral has worked well for me when I used is a few years ago, though I’ve currently resigned the licenses to the trash as I can’t get it to work at all on Asterisk 13.
It has two modes in asterisk, it can create the audio file to a temp location just like flite and play that, or it can stream the audio directly into the channel, which is a better way (I think). The asterisk module to do this though is not maintained by Central an so has no official support.

Still, it’s better than the google option.

For reading the web based content, I doubt you can do this directly in the dialplan, but a simple AGI script could do it. A curl request could get the data and then you could parse it for the required section. Without knowing the type of page you are looking at, I couldn’t be more specific.