What text-to-speech application do you use? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm trying to find a replacement for NaturalReader in Linux but I'm not finding anything as good.

I have played around with different engines, such as Espeak (too robotic), Mozilla TTS and Coqui, and Piper. But I'm looking for an application, not just an engine, something that would allow me to open up a PDF, pick a spot and read from there, then be able to move back and forth on the document. Ideally, I would like to also be able to tell the application how to pronounce certain words.

I haven't figured out how to make Okular use The best I have found is ReadAloud, but it's just a browser addon. Okular doesn't seem to be able to use something like Piper EDIT: but Pied exists: https://github.com/Elleo/pied which makes it work.

Any ideas?

(I use Debian btw :P )

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yes, however scientific papers aren't always linearly formatted PDFs (eg 2-columns), so pdftotext tends to be brittle.

If you only mean reading a file from a specific selection of text, I’ve never seen something that,

Okular actually does that, and with Pied I can use nice Piper voices, but the controls are very basic (start at the stop of the page, pause, stop).

this post was submitted on 07 May 2025

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