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mintPiper

Make Linux speak what's on the screen: clearly and securely.

Overview

mintPiper is for Linux desktop users who want a safe and trustworthy way to read the screen text in high quality, legible audio.

  1. High-Quality Audio: Ensuring crisp and clear audio output.
  2. Privacy and Security: Keeping user data within the local machine.

Features

  • Quality Audio Output: Enjoy clear and understandable audio playback.
  • Privacy-First: Your data remains within your machine, ensuring privacy and security.
  • Fast and Local: Utilizes a local neural text-to-speech system for efficient processing.

Now, with a simple keyboard shortcut (ctrl+alt+p) or by clicking the convenient icon on my panel, I can instantly generate and enjoy high-quality audio playback of any selected text on my screen. Thanks to piper's remarkable work and my mintPiper adaptation, I've found the perfect solution to enhance my Linux experience.

image

Demo

Here's a short demo video.

Setup

Cone this repo:

  $ git clone https://github.com/evuraan/mintPiper.git
  $ cd mintPiper

Run setup.sh with the arguments of (1) a folder to create and write to, and (2) your h/w arch:

  $ ./setup.sh /tools/piper amd64

setup.sh will check for dependencies and when it completes, it would have something like this as its last lines of output:

✅ ... Complete
🟢 For keyboard shortcut: xterm -e "/tools/piper/piper/playSelectedTTS.sh"
🟢 For panel startup application: /tools/piper/piper/mintPiper.py

We need the last two lines, so make a note of those.

Add a keyboard shortcut

Launch Keyboard Shortcuts from your menu, and add a new shortcut.

The command would be what was shown in your 🟢 For keyboard shortcut: output.

So, in my case, the command would be: xterm -e "/tools/piper/piper/playSelectedTTS.sh". Map this shortcut to a keycombo of your choice.

I preferred ctrl alt p as the shortcut.

Once you save, highlight some legible text and press your keyboard shortcut. It should play that back in high-quality, locally created audio.

image

Add a Desktop Launchers

Add a desktop launcher (the icon that would appear on the left side of your desktop window).

Point this launcher to xterm -e "/tools/piper/piper/playSelectedTTS.sh". Use an image from the images folder as the icon thumbnail.

image

Add a panel icon

Optionally, you can create a Desktop Icon too, which appears on the right side of the desktop screen:

Find and launch Startup Applications Preferences from your menu. Add a startup application.

The command should be what was shown in your 🟢 For panel startup application: output from above.

In my example, the command then would be /tools/piper/piper/mintPiper.py:

image

When you login to the desktop next time, you should see the panel icon as in my screenshot above. Left click and select Run Piper TTS, and it should play clear audio of your selected text.

Uninstall:

  1. Remove the startup application from your Startup Applications Preferences.
  2. Remove the keyboard shortcut you added.
  3. Remove the folder you installed mintPiper into. In my example, that would be /tools/piper directory.

Footnotes

  1. Many thanks to piper team at https://github.com/rhasspy/piper.
  2. This PoC may work for Cinnamon, xfce et al.

Credits

mintPiper is inspired by the piper project. Special thanks to the developers for their fantastic work.