You call the Extension Manager in the start window via the Tools menu. You install the extension similar to LibreOffice. However, the current 0.8.49 version of the Read Text extension is only compatible with the newer OpenOffice 4.x versions. With Pico, even older versions of OpenOffice can achieve usable speech output. The project even provides a Read Text extension for OpenOffice 2.x versions, which are more than 10 years old. OpenOffice also supports speech output functions. This closes the window, and the speech synthesizer starts to output the selected text. To get started with voice output, press the OK button in the bottom right-hand corner of the dialog. All you have to do is click on the speaker icon in the browser to start Google's speech synthesizer. The selected text is then automatically sent to Google Translate. If the speech output is not satisfactory during a test, you can also call Google Translate in the web browser via the Use a web application radio button, which defaults to Google Translate. In some cases, various parameterized language settings can also be selected. For some distributions, you can use the parameters in this field to define, for example, whether the system should save the speech output to an audio file. Even if only one synthesizer is installed, it is available for selection with several settings parameters. In the Command line options selection field, first click on the drop-down menu icon to the right and then select a speech synthesizer with the matching options. You do not need to change this setting, because your system automatically determines the paths and the Python version used. Older distributions show /usr/bin/python as the path, while newer distributions use /usr/bin/python3 as shown in Figure 2. The External program radio button is enabled if you are using Pico and eSpeak and lists the path to Python in an input field. Festival always appears first, but it is grayed out if the software is not installed. If Pico is not currently available for your particular distribution, packages from other derivatives of the same distribution base can often be used.įigure 2: You can enable voice output via an easy-to-use dialog.įirst, define the speech synthesizer to be used. These packages require several libttspico0 or lib64ttspico0 packages as dependencies. For other distributions, you can find packages whose names usually start with the string svox-pico. On Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives, you install Pico with the command shown in Listing 1. With the help of an extension for LibreOffice and OpenOffice, Pico can read out text or tables without requiring the user to enter clumsy command sequences in the terminal. The command-line program can convert texts in several languages into.
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One of the most mature applications for text-to-speech synthesis is Pico TTS, a text-to-speech synthesizer originally developed by SVox and used by Google in Android. For example, software only localized in German would render texts that are incomprehensible to Spanish-speaking listeners. Since software packages also need to be localized for the phonemes' linguistic modification, some packages are only usable for certain languages. Solutions based on the popular eSpeak have the disadvantage of a synthetic computer voice: It is quite difficult to understand due to pronunciation that is typically very nasal and partly uses the wrong intonation. On Linux, there are various screen readers for this purpose that are based on text-to-speech programs such as eSpeak or Festival. These programs convert letters into linguistically adapted phonemes and then play them back via the computer's sound system with an installed voice. In this case, programs that read the text out loud can help. The fonts in the documents are almost always too small to be read and deciphering text is also difficult due to the smooth transitions in serif or cursive fonts. While icons can be sufficiently enlarged to make them readable, word processors and spreadsheets are a major hurdle.
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Without special aids, people with vision impairments can find using a computer difficult.