Development/Tutorials/Text-To-Speech

What is Text to Speech?

Jovie (previously called ktts in KDE <= 4.4) -- is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for conversion of text to audible speech. Jovie is currently under development and aims to become the standard subsystem for all KDE applications to provide speech output.

How does it work?

Applications send text they wish spoken to Jovie via D-Bus. For example, in a terminal window, you can type the following commands to start Jovie and speak "Hello World".

# Start Jovie (if not already running)
jovie
# Send "Hello World" to KTTSD for speaking in English.
qdbus org.kde.KSpeech /KSpeech say "Hello World" 0

For a complete description of these and other commands, see the [Text-to-Speech API.]

Jovie takes care of sending the text to speech-dispatcher. Jovie is not a speech synthesis engine itself. You must install one of the compatible speech engines listed below. Speech-dispatcher is designed with a plugin architecture that makes it easy to write new plugins for other speech engines.