Text to speech

General system Applications
1

Hi folks!

I’m looking for a TTS app and wanted to ask for recommendations.

What I want to do is create audio books from pdfs.

What I’m looking for is an app that offers naturally sounding voices (preferably male & female) and is easy and versatile to use. What I mean is that I don’t always want to convert the whole pdf but also just parts. So a command line tool won’t really work here. I either need a GUI or integration in Plasmas context menus (select text by mouse > read aloud / export).

For supported languages, English is most important. Support for German would be appreciated but it’s not a necessity.

I know that’s a lot to ask for and usually a domain of commercial software but maybe there’s something like this to be found in the huge pool of FOSS.

2

I’m using SpeechNote. It’s in the AUR under the name dsnote. However, it always failed when I tried to build it, so I installed it as Flatpak.

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3

This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

I installed as Flatpak also and did a quick test, everything seems to work fine.
Now I just have to find the best voices. There are quite a few, especially for English:slightly_smiling_face:

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4

Yes. You even can mimic your own voice or any other voice from a sound sample! Auch auf deutsch.

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