Requirements
Mandatory requirements:
KDE version 3.2 or later.
A speech synthesis engine. The following engines and spoken languages are currently supported.
| Festival | American English, British, Spanish, German, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Italian, French Canadian, Kiswahili, Zulu, and Ibibio |
| Festival Lite (flite) | English |
| Hadifix (MBROLA and txt2pho) | German, Hungarian |
| Epos | Czech, Slovak |
| FreeTTS | English |
It also works with any synthesis engine that can be run from a command in a Konsole.
The languages listed above may not be comprehensive or up-to-date. Check the specifications for each engine for a complete list of supported languages. Also check the KTTS website for additional information that might not have made it into this handbook.
KTTS uses a flexible plugin architecture for speech synthesis engines. If you want to enhance KTTS to support another engine, contact the development team.
See the section called “Configuration” for specific instructions for each of these engines.
At least one of the following audio subsystems:
KDE aRts Soundsystem. aRts is usually installed with KDE.
ALSA (Advanced Linux® Sound Architecture). ALSA is installed with most Linux® systems. (www.alsa-project.org)
GStreamer version 0.8.7 or greater. Note: Be sure to register your GStreamer plugins by running the gst-register command prior to using GStreamer in KTTS. ( http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org)
aKode library. aKode is a decoder library that is part of KDE.
The KDE project plans to drop aRts starting in version 4.
Some users experience device contention with ALSA. If your system has this problem, you will not be able to simultaneously play music while speaking. KTTS will also freeze if you pause a text job and then start another. See the ALSA website (dmix) for possible solutions.
As of July 2005, aKode does not support a true pause capability. When you pause a text job in KTTS it will finish speaking the current sentence.
Optional components:
The sox audio utility is needed for adjusting overall speech speed, but not required. Debian users can install sox with the command apt-get install sox. Sox is included on most Linux® distribution CDs.
The xsltproc utility is needed for SSML support and for the XML Transformer filter, but not required. Debian users can install xsltproc with the command apt-get install xsltproc.
