FYI: Text to Speech FreePBX Module

[jpe]

Description: This module supports Festival / Flite and Cepstral text to speech engines (autodetect and let the user choose which engine he wants to use). A TTS record can be used as a destination and can be linked to another destination after being played.

Install Text to Speech

1. Download from here to your computer. DO NOT decompress.
2. Go to Module Admin page in FreePBX and Upload Module.
3. Find Module in list and Install.
4. Reload


I've been using it for a while and it works as advertised. It does not allow punctuation. Maybe someone can fix that.

Update:

Clampron posted a fix for the punctuation issue on the freepbx site.

Hi jpe - I just ran into the same thing with allowing Punctuation. Here's a quick fix. Save a copy of the module on your local computer and extract tts-1.0.tgz One of the PHP files is page.tts.php Open this file with a text editor and drop off one of the last IF statements. It is the one that looks like:

Code:

if (!isAlphanumeric(theForm.text.value)) return warnInvalid(theForm.text, msgInvalidTTSText);

Uninstall your first module and reinstall with the edited version. I did notice that if you use a comma it will NOT work correctly, BUT you can use a period instead with a similar effect. Hope this helps - I just spend all day working on this!

Apply the fix and we get period pauses. As he says, commas will cause it not to speak.

[TheShniz]

This is a very interesting module, but could you give some examples on potential applications... as in, what would you use this for?

[jpe]

I originally used it when I had the recording studio going. I would make announcements to let clients know status of the studio via CID.
ie: Your session is delayed by 2 hours. etc, things like that. Anything that a client needed to know and could be answered by calling.
This way I wouldn't have to call them or get disturbed to answer the phone to tell them.

Pretty much anything that you would use the announcement module for, this lets you use the tts engine.

I think a nice advncement to it would be to allow one to set the voice parameters, ie voice, speed etc. I didn't write it and don't have the knowledge to modify.

[tshif]

WOW - that's a very exciting module! I wish I had thought of it.

This has an amazing number of applications. Movie theater, temporary service announcements, even a rudimentary scheduling service could be worked around this. Jerry adn I will look into it and see what could be done about the punctuation issue.

[w1ve]

I'm using it with Cepstral, and it works great. However, the punctuation is real problem. You can't have it say more than one sentence, as you need the period to insert a pause.

I presume the problem is a bug in what was written for the module? Why in the heck would punctuation not be allowed?

I know Cepstral voices for the desktop support xml tags. If we can get around the punctuation issues with this module, those could come in useful if they work with the Linux version of Cepstral.

Very nice module, indeed!

[mrh]

Maybe my novice status.... but I'm having trouble installing the module.

I use the module admin, but I get...

"The following error(s) occurred processing the uploaded file:

• Error untaring uploaded file. Must be a tar+gzip file"

Am I making a basic error?

Many thanks

Matthew

[jroper]

Hi

Windows has a nasty habit of removing file extensions, particularly tgz and tar.gz files.

can you check that your module name has not been "adjusted" by windows.

Joe

[mrh]

Cheers Joe,

Windows has it as ...

"tts-1.0.tgz"

Hope this helps,


Matthew

[tshif]

Maybe my novice status.... but I'm having trouble installing the module.

I use the module admin, but I get...

"The following error(s) occurred processing the uploaded file:

• Error untaring uploaded file. Must be a tar+gzip file"

Am I making a basic error?

Many thanks

Matthew

Matthew - is this on PBXIAF? I really thought Joe's answer was gonna get you going.

[mrh]

Hi guys,

Apologies for the delay.

Yep - running PIAF here!

Cheers

Matthew