piper_gui

a minimalist GUI for piper, on linux.

This is a simple script I created for my own usage:

• to read aloud text from the clipboard.
• to read aloud text typed in a text widget.
• to batch process text from a file into sound files that can be imported into anki.

Usage

• read : read the text in the text widget on the left.
• paste : paste clipboard into this widget.
• clear : clear this widget.
• clipsay : read aloud the clipboard.
• comma : will add a pause between words (by replacing spaces by commas).
• speed : (float) 1 is "normal" reading speed. Less is faster, more is slower.
• ->wav : generate one wav file from the text in the text widget.
• root name : out will output out.wav if you clic ->wav; out1.wav out2.wav... in batch mode. It needs to be unique for each batch for anki.
• /tmp/ (output directory) replace this directory by where you want your files to be created. (I use zram from zram-tools on my pi)
• batch : select a text.txt file (utf8) with one phrase (or word) per line. Each line will generate one wave file.

installation

• get linux and python (min. 3.10) (until now, I thought that piper was linux only, so I wrote with linux support only in mind. You can make a pull request for windows if you want, or buy me an hardware upgrade for windows 10 to 11 and I will add support ;-) ).
• install piper with piper in path.
  • Personally, I used pipx for that. First install it then run pip install piper-tts. It will install it in a venv which is cleaner, and mandatory if pip is managed.
  • download voices for piper. You can run piper example command for that in a directory where you have write access. Change en_US-lessac-medium by the voice you want see list here

echo 'Welcome to the world of speech synthesis!' | piper \
  --model en_US-lessac-medium \
  --output_file welcome.wav

• this will download two files. I recommand that you move them somewhere like /home/your_user_name/.local/pipx/venvs/piper-tts/lang/
• create a venv and download the files from this repo inside the venv. I didn't do it from command line, but I think it's something like
  • (from a directory in your home where you install scripts) python -m venv piper_gui
  • cd piper_gui
  • source ./bin/activate
  • normaly pip list should list only itself.
  • pip install -r requirements.txt
  • modify piper_gui_config.toml : remplace /home/your_user_name/.local/pipx/venvs/piper-tts/lang/ru_RU-irina-medium.onnx by the voice you downloaded.
  • python piper_gui_pygubu.py to run the GUI.
  • sudo chmod +x piper_gui.sh if you want a one-clic bash file to run the gui next time.

Anki

• this script will also generate a semicolon delimited csv file that you can edit to import into anki.
• column A : line of text to read
• column B : name of sound file
• column C : keep only this colomn for anki (text+name of sound that anki will play) So, for anki, delete column A and B, keep C, write translation in new column B. Then convert all wav files to opus (using fre:ac for example, snap install freac), and move the opus files into anki media folder (something like /home/your_user_name/.local/share/Anki2/User 1/collection.media/). Each name must be unique, so change the root name each time.
• if it seems overly complicated, you can use the awesome AwesomeTTS anki plugin.

Todo and limitations

• interaction with piper is dubiously written as I just translated into python their exemple in bash with pipes. (with safeties, but don't try to inject bash commands into the GUI anyway)
• The GUI will freeze during batch and no parallelism is used (because multiprocessing crashes tkinter and I got bored of this)
• If someone asks, I may add an option to change the voice from the gui and not the toml file.