libttspico-utils source package not found

John McCardle johnmccardle at mail.usf.edu
Mon Dec 4 18:45:53 UTC 2017


Hey folks,

I was searching for ways to make espeak's text-to-speech sound more 
natural (postprocessing, I imagined), and instead came across pico2wave- 
a tool from libttspico-utils. The audio it generates does sound more 
natural, and it sounded a little familiar. Apparently it's the default 
voice for at least some previous versions of android.

I was interested in getting the source, partly to see how such a small 
program made such a decent voice, and also to see if this program phones 
home to big G in any way. (It works with the wifi off, but why not look 
and see?)

$ apt source libttspico-utils
Reading package lists... Done
Picking 'svox' as source package instead of 'libttspico-utils'
E: Unable to find a source package for svox

OK... The only hint I could find about pico TTS was that it was 
originally a component of Android. After some digging, I managed to find 
what looks like the source for the library pico2wave is built on top of: 
https://android-review.googlesource.com/admin/projects/platform/external/svox

It's not the utility itself, but all the meat and potatoes are there. 
But where does this package come from? As I'm on Ubuntu, this mailing 
list is listed as the maintainer. But it's available in Debian too: 
https://packages.debian.org/testing/sound/libttspico-utils The source 
package svox is available in their repositories. The android repo is 
listed as an upstream for this debian source package.

But what about the pico2wave binary from the libttspico-utils package? 
Does anybody have some insight into where this software comes from?

Thanks you




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