How to make Python speak

Question

How could I make Python say some text?

I could use Festival with subprocess but I won\'t be able to control it (or maybe in interactive mode, but it won\'t be clean)

Answer 1

A simple Google led me to pyTTS, and a few documents about it. It looks unmaintained and specific to Microsoft's speech engine, however.

On at least Mac OS X, you can use subprocess to call out to the say command, which is quite fun for messing with your coworkers but might not be terribly useful for your needs.

It sounds like Festival has a few public APIs, too:

Festival offers a BSD socket-based interface. This allows Festival to run as a server and allow client programs to access it. Basically the server offers a new command interpreter for each client that attaches to it. The server is forked for each client but this is much faster than having to wait for a Festival process to start from scratch. Also the server can run on a bigger machine, offering much faster synthesis. linky

There's also a full-featured C++ API, which you might be able to make a Python module out of (it's fun!). Festival also offers a pared-down C API -- keep scrolling in that document -- which you might be able to throw ctypes at for a one-off.

Perhaps you've identified a hole in the market?