VOCP System - VOCP - Text-To-Speech

VOCP may be used in conjunction with a text-to-speech program in order to listen to text or HTML emails through the telephone or to hear command shell and script box program output as speech.

In order to use TTS with VOCP, the Festival Text-To-Speech engine must first be installed and configured.

Requirements

To use the email to voicemail functionality, you need the festival text to speech engine.

Setup

Get and install Festival as described at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/. Briefly, you need to get the festival-X.X.X-release, speech_tools-1.2.3-release and, at a minimum, the festlex_CMU, festlex_POSLEX and festvox_kallpc16k files. Untar them all in the same directory, build the speech tools and then festival itself. More detailed instructions are available on the Festival site.

Take note of where you install festival's text2wave program.

As root, edit /usr/local/vocp/bin/txttopvf and set the $txt2wavProg variable to the full path to the text2wave executable. Verify that $wav2pvfProg contains the correct path to the wavtopvf mgetty program.

Now you can test you setup. Do:

$ cat > foo.txt
From: niceguy@vocpsystem.com
Subject: hi there
Hello you are my nice friend.
^D
$ /usr/local/vocp/bin/txttopvf `pwd`/foo.txt `pwd`/foo.pvf
$ ls -l foo.*
-rw-------    1 user   user     444744 Dec  5 13:48 foo.pvf
-rw-rw-r--    1 user   user         79 Dec  5 13:47 foo.txt

Hooray. You can now play the pvf file, say by converting it to wav (pvftowav) or whatever.

Now that txttopvf is set up and working, you can use text-to-speech with VOCP in a few ways.

You can choose to have emails that are delivered to certain addresses converted to speech and dropped into your voice mail box. To do so, please take a look at the email-to-speech.txt file.

You can also setup command shell selections or script boxes that run a program which outputs some text. If the return value for these selections/boxes is set to 'tts', VOCP will convert the text on the fly and read the output to you over the phone. For more information on this, see the box-types.txt and command-shells.txt files.

Be sure to have a look at the pages relating to Email to Voicemail and Using text to speech program output.

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