Original BrickPi Bookreader

7. Setting Up the TTS Engine

For the TTS, we are using eSpeak. It works fine for our purposes: the voice is a little robotic, but it does the job. Here is a definitive guide to TTS on RPi.

First test if the audio is working on the Raspberry Pi. Plug a headphone or speakers in the audio jack and run the following command:

aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/*

If you are able to hear the sounds, move to the next step! If not, this tutorial may help you setup the audio.

Next, install eSpeak. Run the following in terminal:

sudo apt-get install espeak

After it successfully installed, run the following command (disregard error messages on the terminal if you can hear sound):

espeak “hello”

If you are able to hear “hello” from the headphones or the speakers, then move to the next step.