Install svox Package on Slackware 15.0 for Better Text-to-Speech

Gregg

I was having issues finding a good voice synthesis for Foliate to read my books to me. I have always had issues with the sound of the espeak and espeak-ng voices. So I was searching for an alternative. I couldn’t find a way to build festival on Slackware (yet) but while searching around found a package called svox that had a SlackBuild so I thought I’d give it a try.

  1. Install the svox SlackBuild package using whatever tools you would normally use. I happen to use sbotools which make use of the packages maintained by Ponce.
  2. You will end up with a binary called pico2audio which is the program you need to perform all of your text-to-speech needs. See pico2audio --help for details (there aren’t really many).

It was simpler than I thought. Just open Foliate, Settings (the hamburger menu), Preferences and then enter pico2audio in the Text-to-Speech Command box and you’re done.