mimic3/README.md

Mimic 3

A fast and local neural text to speech system for Mycroft and the Mark II.

Available voices

Dependencies

Mimic 3 requires:

• Python 3.7 or higher
• The Onnx runtime
• gruut or eSpeak-ng (depending on the voice)

Installation

eSpeak

Some voices depend on eSpeak-ng, specifically libespeak-ng.so. For those voices, make sure that libespeak-ng is installed with:

sudo apt-get install libespeak-ng1

Mycroft TTS Plugin

Install the plugin:

mycroft-pip install plugin-tts-mimic3[all]

Enable the plugin in your mycroft.conf file:

mycroft-conf set tts.module mimic3_tts_plug

See the plugin's documentation for more options.

Using pip

Install the command-line tool:

pip install mimic3[all]

Once installed, the following commands will be available: * mimic3 * mimic3-download

Install the HTTP web server:

pip install mimic3-http[all]

Once installed, the following commands will be available: * mimic3-server * mimic3-client

Language support can be selectively installed by replacing all with:

• de - German
• es - Spanish
• fr - French
• it - Italian
• nl - Dutch
• ru - Russian
• sw - Kiswahili

Excluding [..] entirely will install support for English only.

From Source

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3.git

Run the install script:

cd mimic3/
./install.sh

A virtual environment will be created in mimic3/.venv and each of the Python modules will be installed in editiable mode (pip install -e).

Once installed, the following commands will be available in .venv/bin: * mimic3 * mimic3-server * mimic3-client * mimic3-download

Voice Keys

Mimic 3 references voices with the format:

• <language>/<name>_<quality> for single speaker voices, and
• <language>/<name>_<quality>#<speaker> for multi-speaker voices
  • <speaker> can be a name or number starting at 0
  • Speaker names come from a voice's speakers.txt file

For example, the default Alan Pope voice key is en_UK/apope_low. The CMU Arctic voice contains multiple speakers, with a commonly used voice being en_US/cmu-arctic_low#slt.

Voices are automatically downloaded from Github and stored in ${HOME}/.local/share/mimic3

Running

Command-Line Tools

The mimic3 command can be used to synthesize audio on the command line:

mimic3 --voice 'en_UK/apope_low' 'My hovercraft is full of eels.' > hovercraft_eels.wav

See voice keys for how to reference voices and speakers.

See mimic3 --help or the CLI documentation for more details.

Web Server and Client

SSML

A subset of SSML is supported.

License

See license file