Raspberry Pi 4 Voice Assistant Part 2 of 4: Google Text to Speech

gTTS: The Empire Strikes Back

In Part 1, one of my goals was to have my laptop issue voice commands to to my Google Home smart speaker. After trying out Mycroft, Jasper seems like the logical next step. The other text to speech systems voice quality were something like the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell products: especially ESP32Talkie. Even Mycroft sounded a bit sad next to my Home Mini speaker.

And then I stumbled upon gTTS, Google Text to Speech.  This python interface to Google's text to speech can be installed using:

pip install gTTS

And requires a program, of only ten lines:

from gtts import gTTS

def text_to_speech(input_name, output_name, language):

    file = open(input_name, 'r')

    content = file.read()

    file.close()

    sound = gTTS(text=content, lang=language)

    sound.save(output_name + '.mp3')

    #https://pypi.org/project/gTTS/

text_to_speech('input_en.txt', 'sound_en', 'en')

#text_to_speech('input_tr.txt', 'sound_tr', 'tr')

print('Done!')

You put your text in a file, input_en.txt:

$cat ./input_en.txt

Hey, Google

$python tts.py

And you get back an mp3 file, sound_en.mp3

And all you need to do now to trigger the Google Home smart speaker is:

$mplayer sound_en.mp3

A typical complete command would be something like:

$mplayer HeyGoogle.mp3; sleep 1; mplayer OfficeLampOn.mp3

For some reason, the other trigger phrase 'OK Google' did not work, but for very little effort I can now integrate disparate IoT devices, be they home brewed, Alexa, or Google Home into one Voice Assistant that rules them all.

Here's what it sounds like:

Happy Trails.

Luke: Vader... Is the dark side stronger?

Yoda: No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.