Text to Speech help / documentation

[villares]

From the FAQ how-to-use-text-to-speech there is this single paragraph:

Foliate supports text-to-speech with speech-dispatcher. To use it, you need to install speech-dispatcher and output modules such as espeak-ng.

As I installed Foliate it asked for optional TTS dependencies, I installed festival, festival-english voices, and also espeak-ng. Then reading the FAQ I installed speech-dispatcher. But there is no hint on Foliate's interface on how to enable the speech feature. I have no idea of what to do next. What am I missing? Could the TTS instructions be expanded a bit maybe?

After another search I found a similar troubleshooting paragraph that mentioned testing speetch-dispatcher with spd-say. It worked for me (spd-say "hello" said "hello" ).

[johnfactotum]

There's nothing to enable. When you click on the play button it will try to spawn speech-dispatcher and send messages to it.

If you're using Flatpak or Snap, or other sandboxed environments, it won't be able to spawn speech-dispatcher and you would either need to enable socket activation (it seems currently only Ubuntu ships speech-dispatcher with socket activation enabled) or keep speech-dispatcher running manually yourself.

[pangyuehung]

enable socket activation

how?

[johnfactotum]

It's a compile time option in speech-dispatcher, if I remember correctly. It's something that should be configured by the distribution.

[villares]

Cheers @johnfactotum, thanks for Foliate and for reaching out!

Where is the play button supposed to appear on the interface? I can't find it.

I have installed Foliate with Manjaro's official repositories (extra) feature, it is not Flatpak nor snap.

[johnfactotum]

There's a Narration button (the one with a headphones icon) on the navbar (which is available by hovering or tapping on the footer area).

Note that if the book has embedded audio (media overlays), the Narration button would show controls for the embedded media, and TTS would not be available in that case.

Alternatively you can select some text and choose Speak from here from the selection menu. Though you still need to use the Narration button if you want to stop the speech output.

[villares]

Ok! So now I found the headphones icon, thank you!

Could this answer be expanded a bit with your previous info?

[johnfactotum]

Done: 1c55b0a.