Recording synthesized text-to-speech to a file in Python

Question

I am attempting to find a way to take synthesized speech and record it to an audio file. I am currently using pyttsx as my text-to-speech library, but there isn't a mechanism for saving the output to a file, only playing it directly from the speakers. I've looked into detecting and recording audio as well as PyAudio, but these seem to take input from a microphone rather than redirecting outgoing audio to a file. Is there a known way to do this?

Answer 1

You can call espeak with the -w argument using subprocess.

import subprocess

def textToWav(text,file_name):
   subprocess.call(["espeak", "-w"+file_name+".wav", text])

textToWav('hello world','hello')

This will write file_name.wav without reading out loud. If your text is in a file (e.g. text.txt) you need to call espeak with the -f parameter ("-f"+text). I'd recommend reading the espeak man pages to see all the options you have.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can use more advanced SAPI wrapper to save output to the wav file. For example you can try

https://github.com/DeepHorizons/tts

The code should look like this:

import tts.sapi
voice = tts.sapi.Sapi()
voice.set_voice("Joey")
voice.create_recording('hello.wav', "Hello")

Answer 3

Here is an example which gives you access to the NSSpeechSynthesizer API

#!/usr/bin/env python

from  AppKit import NSSpeechSynthesizer
import sys
import Foundation


if len(sys.argv) < 2:
   text = raw_input('type text to speak> ')
else:
   text = sys.argv[1]

nssp = NSSpeechSynthesizer
ve = nssp.alloc().init()
ve.setRate_(100)
url = Foundation.NSURL.fileURLWithPath_('yourpath/test.aiff')
ve.startSpeakingString_toURL_(text,url)