Picotts as a TTS engine

General Help
1

Can anyone point me to a resource that can cover how to get Picotts installed as an engine to use in the FreePBX TTS module? Flite is unusable for our specific needs.

Thanks for your help!

FreePBX 14.0.1.4
PBX Firmware:12.7.3-1708-1.sng7
PBX Service Pack:1.0.0.0

2

Bump.

I saw a nerdvittles post: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=16463

Installing Pico TTS on the CentOS/Scientific Linux Platforms
cd /
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/picotts.tar.gz
tar zxvf picotts.tar.gz
cd /root
./picotts-install.sh
sed -i ‘s|en)|en-US)|’ /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf
sed -i ‘s|googletts|picotts|’ /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf
asterisk -rx “dialplan reload”

Would this work with FreePBX 14.0.1.4 PBX Firmware:12.7.3-1708-1.sng7? Even if it did, would it get overridden on a FreePBX reboot?

Thanks for any insights!

3

I wouldn’t go down that rabbit hole. Those scripts tend to have no sanity or error checking. They make a ton of assumptions under the “works for me” banner.

Assuming those coppied correctly they are already wrong.

Is there a specific reason you need picotts?

4

No, we do not require Picotts specifically, just something that is of that quality voice (or better, preferably). The included FLITE TTS engine is not suitable for customer-facing applications in our environment.

Ideally, we need something that sounds better, but is built out in FreePBX, so that our employees can take advantage of the beautiful (and relatively intuitive) FreePBX GUI when building call treatments.

I am aware of solutions like LumenVox, but the licensing model quoted to me seems so backwards (and expensive!) compared to what we can do with Amazon Polly and the next wave of TTS as a service.

I guess a better question is are there any directions that can help us install a local, picotts-like quality TTS, that works with the FreePBX GUI, without going a route like LumenVox?

5

Not sure if you tried it already, but I managed to install Festival, and while the quality depends a lot on the voice packages, I can say that they sound quite good.

Since Festival is already included on the TTS module, there are no modifications needed to make it work with FreePBX, apart from specific configurations of the Festival engine.

If this is something you might find useful, let me know and I will try to find the notes I used to install Festival.

6

Sure, that does sound useful. If you had notes that would be great. Also if you hard any recommendations English (US) voices, that would be very helpful.

7

I’m using it with spanish voices, as I’m in Argentina, but I guess there must be open source english voices, at least one or two.

8

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