How to install MaryTTS on Ubuntu?

Question

Can anybody help me to install MaryTTS on my Ubuntu 15.10? I have been looking for good, natural voice on Linux for a while. On online demo it sounds great! And I hope to use MaryTTS to read pdf files (Adobe Reader has that option).

But I am not able to install MaryTTS. I really disappointed that there is no step by step guide for us who are not experts. So can anyone give me simple step by step explanation how to install MaryTTS.

Answer 1

To install the latest version:

• Download this file
• Extract it (just double-click it)
• Open a terminal window (with Ctrl+Alt+T), and navigate to the extracted folder using the cd command. For example, using cd /home/<username>/Downloads/marytts-installer-5.1.2/
• there, type ./marytts

After that, you will see an output like this one:

lucho@lucho:~$ ./marytts

Downloading https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-2.3-bin.zip
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Unzipping /home/<username>/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-2.3-bin/a48v6zq5mdp1uyn9rwlj56945/gradle-2.3-bin.zip to /home/<username>/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-2.3-bin/a48v6zq5mdp1uyn9rwlj56945
Set executable permissions for: /home/<username>/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-2.3-bin/a48v6zq5mdp1uyn9rwlj56945/gradle-2.3/bin/gradle
:help

Welcome to Gradle 2.3.

To run a build, run marytts <task> ...

To see a list of available tasks, run marytts tasks

To see a list of command-line options, run marytts --help

To see more detail about a task, run marytts help --task <task>

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 15.607 secs
logout

[Process completed]

Note: to use this software, java must be installed in your system. Check this AskUbuntu Question for that.

Answer 2

I have moved from windows to Ubuntu recently and I'm still working on building my environment, and so far, I'm enjoying it a lot. I frequently use the Narrator from Firefox and the default Ubuntu TTS doesn't sound good to my ears, so I was researching and found this post. As I was able to install MaryTTS without issues, I'm providing details of my experience in case it is useful for anybody:

1. Download the latest version of MaryTTS installer (marytts-installer-5.2.zip) from here.
2. Install Java, I followed the Digital Ocean guide and installed the latest version (11 I guess) but MaryTTS installer didn't work, so I had to uninstall it and install v8 as indicated in the reference above.
3. Unzip the installer file and start the installation with ./marytts install. It downloaded a lot of files and took a lot of time, so be patient.
4. Start MaryTTS server running ./marytts -i. This will show some output on the console. You will know the server is ready when seeing INFO marytts.server Waiting for client to connect on port 59125. It takes some time to finish, and this might be discouraging since it seems to be heavy in processing and space used on your system.
5. Test the server by opening http://localhost:59125/in your web browser and play with the examples provided.

I tried to configure speech-dispatcher (the engine that enables TTS on Linux) with MaryTTS but it seems this is not supported in my current Ubuntu version (18.04). I could see the configuration module is available for Ubuntu 20.04, so perhaps I will give it a try when I do the upgrade.

I have ended configuring STT with festival which works OK with Firefox for Spanish and English voices. If interested in know how to do it, check this post.