PICO2WAVE(1)

NAME
pico2wave - Small Footprint TTS

SYNOPSIS
pico2wave -w <filename.wav> [ -l <language> ] [ <words> ]

DESCRIPTION
pico2wave is a small footprint Text to Speech utility, using the SVOX Pico engine [*]. It converts text given on the command line (or standard input, if no <words> on command line) to audible speech, and writes to a RIFF .wav file.

Note: Only one <words> argument is spoken. Any further arguments are silently ignored. This means that you must quote your argument, if it has multiple words (e.g. a sentence).

The generated wav files are PCM, 16-bit mono, 16KHz sampling rate.

[*] The SVOX Pico engine is a software speech synthesizer for German, English (GB and US), Spanish, French and Italian. SVOX produces clear and distinct speech output, made possible by the use of Hidden Markov Model (HMM) algorithms.

OPTIONS

-w, --wave=filename.wav
    Write output to this WAV file (extension SHOULD be .wav). This option is required: pico2wave cannot write to standard output (not even if you use -w /dev/stdout, sorry). If the file already exists, it will be overwritten with no confirmation or warning.

-l, --lang=lang
    Language (default: en-US). The languages supported are currently de-DE, en-GB, en-US, es-ES, fr-FR, it-IT.

  Help options:

-?, --help
    Show help message

--usage
    Display brief usage message

EXAMPLES

pico2wav -w test.wav 'Hello, world.'

Creates a file test.wav containing the words "Hello, world."

echo 'Hello, world.' | pico2wav -w test.wav

Same as above, reading from standard input.

pico2wav -w test.wav < gettysburg_address.txt

Convert an entire text file to speech.

SEE ALSO

pico2audio(1)