Using espeak on Alpine Linux

Espeak

espeak (https://espeak.sourceforge.net/) multi-lingual speech synthesis is available in Alpine Linux 1.7.29 and above. So this just begs the question... what cool things can you do with a router that talks?

But the first thing to do is just to get the router to talk.

Requirements

• the soundcard and oss modules must be loaded.
• use umix to set the volume on the sound card
• sox is required to play the voice (for some reason alpine espeak doesn't talk to /dev/dsp)

Example

For historical reasons, the canonical reference for speech synthesis on Alpine Linux is the phrase "Liver. Yes you heard me. Liver. There's nothing I can do about it."

To get your router to say, that, send the output of espeak to stdout, and pipe the result to sox's play command:

  espeak --stdout "Liver. Yes you heard me.  Liver.  There's nothing I can do about it." | play  -t wav -

enjoy.