Mbrola

Introduction

mbrola is a non-free phonemes-to-audio program.

Step 1: Installation

A package is available in AUR.

Step 2: Add voices

Packages named mbrola-voices-xxx are available in AUR.

Step 3: Testing

Once you have installed the wanted voice(s) go to the directory of the installed language:

$ cd /usr/share/voices/us1/

then list the test files:

$ ls TEST/

If there are no test files for this language skip this test and go to step 3 or try with an other language. Else choose a test file (files with .pho extension) and try:

$ mbrola ./us1 ./TEST/mbrola.pho ~/test.wav; aplay ~/test.wav; rm ~/test.wav

If you here a voice it works, if not, check that you did everything good and if it still don't work go ask for help on forums.

Note that we didn't give a text file to mbrola but a phoneme file so we don't have a text-to-speech system yet so lets see the next step.

Step 4: Install a text-to-phonemes program

To obtain a full TTS system we need a text-to-phonemes program compatible with mbrola: List of TTS programs compatible with mbrola.

lliaphon

LLiaPhon is a TTS program which uses mbrola.

See the detailed article: lliaphon