TEXT-TO-SPEECH
How I use tts to improve my life.

Using espeak-ng (text to phoneme engine) and mbrola (phoneme to audio
synthesizer), it's possible to have a decent text-to-speech setup.

For half a year I've experimented with using only espeak. My brain has adjusted
to the robotic voice and now I can interpret almost anything it says. While this
is good in the sense that I have only to implement espeak if I ever needed to,
using mbrola with espeak-ng gives a much higher quality of life.

Since these two pieces of software are open source, I can always support them,
even into my golden years, either with my own time, or money.

Now let's get on with what I primarily use it for.

SETUP

I use the `english-mb-en1` voice, and create a small script file to hold the
"configuration" at `/usr/local/bin/say`.

FROM HERE FORWARD, all references to `espeak` actually mean this script.

I set the speed to 145 (average spoken words per minute in English), but I
expect this to rise overtime for myself and anyone else.

I set the pitch to 80. I find by default the voice is a tad too deep.

IRC

When away, or focusing on something else, I don't want to have to look at what
people are saying to me when they want my attention. I just want to hear it, as
if they are right beside me.

For this I use a weechat plugin that simply pipes highlighted text into
espeak-ng. It can be configured to speak everything said by anyone, but this is
too much for anyone really, unless you're in many quiet channels.

VIM

In vim I've written my own simple vimscript that simply pipes the current line,
word, or character, or line number, to espeak. I pass additional parameters to
force it to say all punctuation (as I'm a programmer and that's important for
me) and slow down the talking speed to 120.

These are enough to navigate effectively through code or any text.

A goal here is eventually to be able to write a full application with my eyes
closed, with confidence. Mainly because it's super ergonomic for eyes.

SHELL

So far I have no configuration for my shell (which is bash, and always will be
bash).