Home Linux Commandline Tools gosling – Natural Sounding Text-to-Speech in the Terminal

gosling – Natural Sounding Text-to-Speech in the Terminal

A text-to-speech (TTS) system is one attributed to the efficiency of seamlessly converting an input text file to an output audio file with reasonable clarity. Such a solution makes it possible for users to engage with a computerized environment without having to manually read through a text file or documentation file.

For instance, a text-to-speech tool is a priceless solution for users with both reading and hearing difficulties making it a perfect inclusion in an e-learning project. It is also an alternative to hiring a voice-over artist since it saves on hiring costs.

We can therefore summarize the benefits of text-to-speech solutions with the following bullet points:

  • Better user experience since a transcript of any video can be converted to a natural-sounding audio file.
  • Improved accessibility and understanding of learning materials, especially for users with reading and hearing difficulties.
  • Improved reading and learning skills since most text-to-speech solutions can be executed in multiple languages.

gosling is a natural-sounding text-to-speech tool that can be implemented on a Linux operating system terminal environment. If you are familiar with Google’s Cloud Text-to-Speech API, then gosling is more of a wrapper around it.

Prerequisites

  • An up-to-date Linux operating system distribution.
  • Sudoer/root user privileges.
  • Familiarity with using the Linux command-line environment.
  • A GCP account with billing enabled (you get 1 million characters free per month and are only charged if you exceed them).
  • Once you have a GCP account, enable the TTS API and get a service account.

This article will walk us through the installation and testing of gosling as a natural-sounding text-to-speech solution.

Install gosling text-to-speech in Linux

We will need a sample text file to demonstrate our text-to-speech solution.

$ nano speech.txt
Text-to-Speech File
Text-to-Speech File

Next, go to the gosling releases page and download the tar.gz file that best suits the system architecture of the Linux operating system distribution you are using.

On my end, I will execute the following wget command for the download of gosling version 0.1.1 (latest release as per the publication of this article).

$ wget https://github.com/Samyak2/gosling/releases/download/v0.1.1/gosling-v0.1.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz  

Proceed to decompress the archive using tar command.

$ tar -xvzf gosling-v0.1.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz

The extracted file gosling from the tar.gz archive is a binary file and therefore executable. Therefore, to run gosling, we will need to implement the following command syntax on the Linux terminal.

Also, make sure you are on the same directory with the extracted gosling binary file while referencing the following gosling usage syntax.

Generating Audio from Text File in Linux

In our case, the implementation of the above gosling command syntax will look like the following:

$ ./gosling speech.txt speech.mp3

The output audio file should be created and playable on any media player.

$ ls -l speech.mp3
Create Audio from Text in Linux
Create Audio from Text in Linux

Generating Audio from Standard Input

We do not necessarily need to generate an audio file from a text file. We can achieve the same objective from standard input as demonstrated below:

$ echo "Hello and welcome to linuxshelltips" | ./gosling - new.mp3
Create Audio from Standard Input
Create Audio from Standard Input

Generating and Playing Audio Directly from Standard Input

Here, we could use ffplay from ffmpeg in the following manner:

$ echo "LinuxShellTips is awesome" | ./gosling - - | ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -
Create Playing Audio from Standard Input
Create Playing Audio from Standard Input

More gosling options can be found by running the command:

$ ./gosling --help

If you have go programming language installed, you can install gosling directly from the command:

$ go install github.com/Samyak2/gosling@latest

All the best in your gosling text-to-speech projects. If you found this article guide useful, feel free to leave a comment or feedback.

Ravi Saive
I am an Experienced GNU/Linux expert and a full-stack software developer with over a decade in the field of Linux and Open Source technologies. Founder of TecMint.com, LinuxShellTips.com, and Fossmint.com. Over 150+ million people visited my websites.

Each tutorial at UbuntuMint is created by a team of experienced writers so that it meets our high-quality standards.

Was this article helpful? Please add a comment to show your appreciation and support.

Got something to say? Join the discussion.

Thanks for choosing to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and your email address will NOT be published or shared. Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation.