I've been meaning to share this for a while, but for any Android users out who want to use a text-to-speech engine other than Google's, I recommend Sherpa TTS: https://github.com/woheller69/ttsEngine
It's open source, offline, multilingual, and available on F-Droid.
I use text-to-speech a lot with my RSS readers (Feeder and ReadYou), and it's been a game-changer.
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#texttospeech #tts #opensource #fdroid #rss #Feeder #ReadYou #degoogled #candidefindings
To get it working, download the app from F-Droid (here's more info on how to install F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/docs/Get_F-Droid/#option-2-download-and-install-f-droid-apk), or download the .apk to install it directly: https://www.openapk.net/ttsengine/org.woheller69.ttsengine/.
Once it's installed, open the app and add the voices of your choice.
SherpaTTS supports voice models from:
➡️ Piper — demos, dataset links, training info, and licenses: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/
➡️ Coqui — info: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
I use Piper's "Alba" voice for English, and "UPMC" for French.
Once you've installed the language model(s) of your choice, click on the gear icon at the bottom-right to be taken to your phone's "Text-to-speech output" settings. Click on "Preferred engine", and select SherpaTTS.
There you have it! You can now use SherpaTTS with any app that uses Android's speech synthesis.
My favourite ones are:
Feeder, an RSS reader: https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder
ReadYou, an RSS reader: https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou
Dicio, an open source Google Assistant alternative: https://github.com/Stypox/dicio-android
Voice Aloud Reader, an app to read out documents: https://hyperionics.com/atvoice/
