Is it possible to make a "text for voice" with Pyqt?

Question

I’m learning to play with Pyqt. I’m building a simple application, where there will be a voice notification when a new request is available.

I wish my application written in Pyqt4 could "turn" text into voice.

I managed to do this with HTML5 and Javascript, but now I’d like to know if there is any way to do something similar to Pyqt.

Is there any functionality in Pyqt or that can be used together with Pyqt to do Text to Speech (text-to-voice)?

Answer 1

I believe that Pyqt4 does not have support for this, and pyqt5 may only come in more support in the future (apparently Qtspeech is quite recent), so using Pyqt is not an option, however I found this: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyttsx (is a little outdate 2012), but he is cross-Platform and support Python2 and this https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS

pyttsx

Drivers required by environment:

• nsss - Nsspeechsynthesizer on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher

  Details: https://developer.apple.com/reference/appkit/nsspeechsynthesizer

• sapi5 - SAPI5 on Windows

  Download at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27224

• Espeak - Speak in linux distros

  Installing in Debian and Ubuntu:

  sudo apt-get install espeak
  

  To manually install: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html

Then you can install it via PIP:

pip install pyttsx

Take an example:

import pyttsx

engine = pyttsx.init()
engine.say('Hello World!')
engine.runAndWait()

Links:

• Repository: https://github.com/RapidWareTech/pyttsx
• Documentation: http://pyttsx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

In the releases of github https://github.com/RapidWareTech/pyttsx/releases and maybe Pip only shows version 1.1, but doc already informs about version 1.2, in case it would just install this https://github.com/RapidWareTech/pyttsx/tree/master/pyttsx manually

lib by itself does not have the languages installed, who has to have installed is the driver used, in the case of Espeak I think it already comes with Portuguese, to configure the language in lib one can use something like, the for is to get all the voices:

engine = pyttsx.init()
voices = engine.getProperty('voices')
for voice in voices:
   engine.setProperty('voice', voice.id)  # troca a voz
   engine.say('The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.')
engine.runAndWait()

Then you will select the voice you want, note that voices = engine.getProperty('voices') returns the class class pyttsx.voice.Voice, which has the following properties:

• .age returns the age in years as integer
• .gender returns a String that contains the genre of voice that may be female, male or neutral
• .id is the voice identifier to be used in pyttsx.engine.Engine.setPropertyValue()
• .languages returns a list of strings that shows speech-supported languages
• .name returns a String containing a "human" name to help assimilate language, gender, etc

In case you can use voice.languages to obtain the ID of the Portuguese language and so set it.

If there is no Portuguese language in the list it is because the driver does not support or has not installed the language, in the case of linux and Espeak already comes with several languages:

• http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html

Windows also seems to already have some including those in English:

• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh378476(v=office.14). aspx

What I like about espeek is that it has support for Windows and Macosx, I just don’t know if lib is compatible

---

gTTS

gTTS (Google Text to Speech) is an interface that transforms text into audio and saves into a . mp3

To install run the PIP:

pip install gTTS

Use:

from gtts import gTTS

tts = gTTS(text='Hello', lang='en')

tts.save("hello.mp3") #Salva o arquivo

In Portuguese:

from gtts import gTTS

tts = gTTS(text='Olá', lang='pt-br')

tts.save("ola.mp3") #Salva o arquivo

Supported languages: https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS#lang_list