Text to MP3 using pyTTS - Non-programmer question

[Michael]

Marc Shapiro wrote:

> From what I've seen, pyTTS is Windows only.  Is there a package that
> runs on linux that provides similar functionality.  I have festival and
> festlite, but I would prefer a Python solution.

From: http://www.cam.org/~nico/cicero/cicero-README.txt

"""
Cicero TTS: A Small, Fast and Free Text-To-Speech Engine.

Copyright 2003-2006 Nicolas Pitre <nico at cam.org>
Copyright 2003-2006 Stéphane Doyon <s.doyon at videotron.ca>

Version 0.7, March 2006

Our TTS engine currently speaks French and some resemblance of English, 
although we hope it can some day be taught to speak good English or other 
languages. The engine uses context-sensitive rules to produce phonemes 
from the text. It relies on MBROLA 
(http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html) to generate actual audio 
output from the phonemes. The TTS engine is implemented using the Python 
programming language.

We've come up with this TTS to try and meet our own needs as blind users. 
"""

"""
This is still an early release of our TTS, quality is beta-ish. 
Installation/integration surely has rough edges still, and pronunciation 
is constantly improving. The TODO-list is still generous.
"""

I've not tried this, but I suspect this might be a good place to start
(though coaxing it to do english might well be a project in itself,
depending on what they mean by "some semblance of English" :-)

Regards,


Michael.