GehrigNET

Pidgin/Purple (formerly known as Gaim)

Text-to-speech plugin

I started with a perl plugin, but at some point it ceased to work, so I decided to port it to C.
Currently the path for the TTS engine is hard-coded, so you will have to change that by hand. But perhaps I will add a preference dialog some time.
So first of all download the source code.
Make sure you have the purple development headers installed, probably a package named libpurple-dev.
(For archival purpose here is the source code of the gaim plugin.
Make sure you have the gaim development headers installed for that one, probably a package named gaim-dev.)
Now you can compile it as follows:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install

You may want to specify a prefix path where you want the plugin to be installed to by doing

./configure --prefix=/my/path

After this is done. It won't run yet. First you will need the TTS engine. I based that work on a article in the linux magazin, where the mbrola TTS engine was used as backend. Additionally, since mbrola does not understand plain text, you need a txt2pho converter. Since I am a german speaking person I used the german frontend as referenced in the article. This is also wrapped by a script called sag_was that I have modified a bit. I not sure if my version of that script was based on the code published in the article, but I am missing the original reference for that:-(.
When you are able to use sag_was on the command line and changed the line saying

        args[2] = "/home/tobias/bin/sag_was";

in texttospeech.c, you should be able to just launch pidgin (or whatever frontend uses purple) and activate the plugin in the preferences dialog and listen to what your chat partner tells you.
Have fun!

last modified: Wednesday, 12-May-2010 00:53:32 CEST