[GUI Plugin] TTS to MP3: Create MP3 audiobook using Windows TTS

[PeterT]

I wonder whether it would be possible to use Piper to convert an eBook to Audio?

[Comfy.n]

I've installed Piper and had some good laughs the other day. The batch script I'm running can feed Piper with a text file, although I've only tried it with small texts. Something like this:

 type text.txt | piper -m %selectedFile% -f voice-%selectedFile%-%dt%.wav

The laugh part was due to Ryan seemingly hallucinating while narrating this text:

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the ‘free’ market.

‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,’ he added untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the edge of the counter.

‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ said Syme.

‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently. ‘I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.’

‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. ‘I know you,’ the eyes seemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.’ In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

I wanted to see how the different voices available in Calibre would handle the same text, so this script made a wave file with each one of them. I was interested especially in the paragraph ‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’, to see how the interrogation would sound in each voice.

Enter Ryan... (i've attached ryan's and libritts narrations)

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I wonder whether it would be possible to use Piper to convert an eBook to Audio?

I've opened a thread in the calibre Development forum.

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

At first glance it seems the underlying calibre code for the Windows SAPI speech engine, which was essential for this plugin, has been removed [...]

I've spotted this line earlier today on a Calibre debug log I generated on v7.18:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'calibre_extensions.winsapi'