Text to speech with Python 3 on Linux and OSX

Recently I had a requirement to synthesise speech from text on two different operating systems. Here is what I came up with.

OSX

Synthesising speech is a simple matter for OSX users because the operating system comes with the say command. We can use subprocess to call it.

import subprocess

def say(text):
    subprocess.call('say ' + text, shell=True)

say('Hello, world!')

import subprocess

def say(text):

subprocess.call('say ' + text, shell=True)

say('Hello, world!')

Linux

On Linux, there are a few different options. I like to use the espeak Python bindings when I can. You can install it on Ubuntu using apt-get .

apt-get install python-espeak

1	apt-get install python-espeak

Then use it like so:

from espeak import espeak
espeak.synth('Hello, world!')

1 2	from espeak import espeak espeak.synth('Hello, world!')

espeak supports multiple languages, so if you are not dealing with English text, you need to pass in the language code. Unfortunately, it looks like the Python bindings don’t support that yet, but we can still use subprocess like we did on linux.

import subprocess

def say_with_espeak(text, lang="en"):
    subprocess.call("espeak -v {0} {1}".format(lang, text), shell=True)

import subprocess

def say_with_espeak(text, lang="en"):

subprocess.call("espeak -v {0} {1}".format(lang, text), shell=True)

The list of available languages can be found on the espeak website here.

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