The latest version of Rasbian OS for the Raspberry PI does not include the pico tts (text to speech) engine. Well, the data file available but the utils and lib files are missing.
So, after some searching, I found a website in english, written by a german, who translated it from a french website, on how to download and compile the source. There is no date on the article, and the instructions are not that clear, so I have re-written them below:
The source code is available in the archive repository of the rasbian linux, so they must be added to the available source lists.
Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following two lines at the end:
deb http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian wheezy main contrib non-free rpi deb-src http://archice.raspbian.org/raspbian wheezy main contrib non-free rpi
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Now refresh the repositories:
sudo apt-get update
So that we do not need to become root to build the package, install fakeroot:
sudo apt-get install fakeroot
To get all the additional packages (programs and libraries) that are needed by the pico engine, download them using build-dep:
sudo apt-get build-dep libttspico-utils
We need a place to download the source and compile (build) it. From your home directory:
cd mkdir pico_build cd pico_build
And now download the source:
apt-get source libttspico-utils
This will download a number of packages which were then converted into directories. We need to build the source within the directory called svox-(version number). And then build:
cd svox-(version number) dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc
On a raspberry pi version 1 this will take considerable time, approx. 30 minutes or so.
When it has completed return to the above directory and there will be 3 deb files:
cd ../ ls *.deb
It is now time to install these programs:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
and now you should be able to test the newly installed program:
pico2wave -w test.wav "Hello there from Pico!" aplay test.wav
The instructions for pico2wave are here – http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pico2wave.1.html
You have one to many t’s in the following line 😉
# apt-get source libtttspico-utils
Thanks. Fixed.