Installing pyttsx3 on Linux Mint

Question

I installed successfully pyttsx3 with pip install pyttsx3 and I wrote the following code:

import pyttsx3 

def speak(text):
     engine = pyttsx3.init()
     engine.say(text)
     engine.runAndWait()
text = 'hello'
speak(text)

When I run the code I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/walter197/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyttsx3/__init__.py", line 20, in init
eng = _activeEngines[driverName]
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/weakref.py", line 137, in __getitem__
o = self.data[key]()
KeyError: None

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: 

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "scrap.py", line 104, in <module>
speak(text)
File "scrap.py", line 100, in speak
engine = pyttsx3.init()
File "/home/walter197/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyttsx3/__init__.py", line 22, in init
eng = Engine(driverName, debug)
File "/home/walter197/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyttsx3/engine.py", line 30, in __init__
 self.proxy = driver.DriverProxy(weakref.proxy(self), driverName, debug)
 File "/home/walter197/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyttsx3/driver.py", line 50, in __init__
self._module = importlib.import_module(name)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/importlib/__init__.py", line 126, in import_module
return _bootstrap._gcd_import(name[level:], package, level)
 File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 994, in _gcd_import
 File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 971, in _find_and_load
 File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 955, in _find_and_load_unlocked
 File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 665, in _load_unlocked
 File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 678, in exec_module
 File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 219, in _call_with_frames_removed
 File "/home/walter197/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyttsx3/drivers/espeak.py", line 9, in <module>
 from . import _espeak, toUtf8, fromUtf8
 File "/home/walter197/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pyttsx3/drivers/_espeak.py", line 18, in <module>
dll = cdll.LoadLibrary('libespeak.so.1')
 File "/usr/lib/python3.6/ctypes/__init__.py", line 426, in LoadLibrary
 return self._dlltype(name)
 File "/usr/lib/python3.6/ctypes/__init__.py", line 348, in __init__
  self._handle = _dlopen(self._name, mode)
  OSError: libespeak.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Knowing that I updated the packages before installing, and my Python version is 3.6.9 Please tell me what's the problem and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

You don't have a required library installed on your system, hence the final bit of the error:

libespeak.so.1 error: no such file or directory found.

You can try to install espeak:

sudo apt install espeak

Or the development version of the library:

sudo apt install libespeak-dev

If you're interested by the multilingual version instead:

sudo apt install libespeak-ng-libespeak-dev