Mimic is a fast, lightweight Text-to-speech engine developed by Mycroft A.I. and VocaliD, based on Carnegie Mellon University’s Flite (Festival-Lite) software. Mimic takes in text and reads it out loud to create a high quality voice.
Official project site: mimic.mycroft.ai
- Linux (ARM & Intel architectures)
- Mac OS X
- Windows
Untested
- Android
Future
- iOS
This is the list of requirements. Below there is the commands needed on the most popular distributions and supported OS.
- A good C compiler:
- GNU make, automake and libtool
- pkg-config
- Optionally, PCRE2 library and headers (they are compiled otherwise)
- An audio engine:
- Linux: ALSA/PortAudio/PulseAudio (Recommended: ALSA)
- Mac OSX: PortAudio
- Windows: PortAudio
$ sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool libasound2-dev
$ sudo dnf install gcc make pkgconfig automake libtool alsa-lib-devel
$ sudo pacman -S --needed install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool alsa-lib
-
Install Brew
$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" -
Install pkg-config, automake, libtool, pcre2 and PortAudio
$ brew install pkg-config automake libtool portaudio pcre2
The fastest and most straightforward way to build mimic for windows is by cross-compilation from linux. This requires some additional packages to be installed.
On Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic):
sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool libpcre2-dev wine-stable binutils-mingw-w64-i686 mingw-w64-i686-dev gcc-mingw-w64-i686
On Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial):
sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool libpcre2-dev wine binutils-mingw-w64-i686 mingw-w64-i686-dev gcc-mingw-w64-i686
On Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty):
sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool mingw32 mingw32-runtime wine
- Audio device and audio libraries are optional, as mimic can write its output to a waveform file.
- Some of the source files are quite large, that some C compilers might choke on these. So, gcc is recommended.
- Visual C++ 6.0 is known to fail on the large diphone database files
- The build process is MUCH slower on Windows.
-
Clone the repository
$ git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic1.git -
Navigate to mimic directory
$ cd mimic1 -
Build and install missing dependencies (pcre2)
$ ./dependencies.sh --prefix="/usr/local" -
Generate mimic build scripts
$ ./autogen.sh -
Configure.
$ ./configure --prefix="/usr/local" -
Build
$ make -
Check
$ make check
- Run the windows build script:
./run_testsuite.sh winbuild
- Test it: The directory
installwill containbin/mimic.exefile
wine ./mimic.exe -t "hello world"
- Distribute it
You can distribute the compiled mimic by adding to a zip file everything in the
install/winbuild/bin directory.
By default mimic will play the text using an audio device. Alternatively it can
output the wave file in RIFF format (often called .wav).
-
To an audio device
$ ./mimic -t TEXTExample
$ ./mimic -t "Hello. Doctor. Name. Continue. Yesterday. Tomorrow." -
To an audio file
$ ./mimic -t TEXT -o WAVEFILEExample
$ ./mimic -t "Hello. Doctor. Name. Continue. Yesterday. Tomorrow." -o hello.wav
-
To an audio device
$ ./mimic -f TEXTFILEExample
$ ./mimic -f doc/alice -
To an audio file
$ ./mimic -f TEXTFILE -o WAVEFILE`Example
$ ./mimic -f doc/alice -o hello.wav
-
List available internal voices
$ ./mimic -lv -
Use an internal voice
$ ./mimic -t TEXT -voice VOICEExample
$ ./mimic -t "Hello" -voice slt -
Use an external voice file
$ ./mimic -t TEXT -voice VOICEFILEExample
$ ./mimic -t "Hello" -voice voices/cmu_us_slt.flitevox -
Use an external voice url
$ ./mimic -t TEXT -voice VOICEURLExample
$ ./mimic -t "Hello" -voice http://www.festvox.org/flite/packed/flite-2.0/voices/cmu_us_ksp.flitevox
-
mimic offers several voices that can use different speech modelling techniques (diphone, clustergen, hts). Voices can differ a lot on size, naturalness and intelligibility.
-
Diphone voices are less computationally expensive and quite intelligible but they lack naturalness (sound more robotic). e.g.
./mimic -t "Hello world" -voice kal16 -
clustergen voices can sound more natural and intelligible at the expense of size and computational requirements. e.g.: e.g.
./mimic -t "Hello world" -voice slt,./mimic -t "Hello world" -voice ap -
hts voices usually may sound a bit more synthetic than clustergen voices, but have much smaller size. e.g.: e.g.
./mimic -t "Hello world" -voice slt_hts
-
-
Voices can be compiled (built-in) into mimic or loaded from a
.flitevoxfile. The only exception are hts voices. hts voices combine both a compiled function with a voice data file.htsvoice. Mimic will look for the.htsvoicefile when the hts voice is loaded, looking into the current working directory, the "voices" subdirectory and the$prefix/share/mimic/voicesdirectory if it exists. -
Voice names are identified as loadable files if the name includes a "
/" (slash) otherwise they are treated as internal compiled-in voices. -
The
voices/directory contains several flitevox voices. Existing Flite voices can be found here: http://www.festvox.org/flite/packed/flite-2.0/voices/ -
The voice referenced via an url will be downloaded on the fly.
Voices accept additional debug options. specified as --setf feature=value in the
command line. Wrong values can prevent mimic from working. Some speech modelling
techniques may not implement support for changing these features so at some point
some voices may not provide support for these options. Here are some examples:
-
Use simple concatenation of diphones without prosodic modification
./mimic --sets join_type=simple_join doc/intro.txt -
Print sentences as they are said
./mimic -pw doc/alice -
Make it speak slower
./mimic --setf duration_stretch=1.5 doc/alice -
Make it speak faster
./mimic --setf duration_stretch=0.8 doc/alice -
Make it speak higher
./mimic --setf int_f0_target_mean=145 doc/alice
See lang/cmu_us_kal/cmu_us_kal.c) to see some other features and values.
- The talking clock requires a single argument HH:MM. Under Unix you can call it
./mimic_time `date +%H:%M`
- For benchmarking, "none" can be used to discard the generated audio and give a summary of the speed:
./mimic -f doc/alice none
For those who wish to help contribute to the development of mimic there are a few things to keep in mind.
We will be using a branching struture similar to the one described in this article
-
masterbranch is for stable releases, -
developmentbranch is where development work is done between releases, -
Any feature branch should branch off from
development, and when complete will be merged back intodevelopment. -
Once enough features are added or a new release is complete those changes in
developmentwill be merged intomaster, then work can continue ondevelopmentfor the next release.
To keep the code in mimic coherent a simple coding style/guide is used. It should be noted that the current codebase as a whole does not meet some of these guidlines,this is a result of coming from the flite codebase. As different parts of the codebase are touched, it is the hope that these inconsistancies will diminish as time goes on.
-
Indentation
Each level of indentation is 4 spaces.
-
Braces
Braces always comes on the line following the statement.
Example
void cool_function(void) { int cool; for (cool = 0; cool < COOL_LIMIT; cool++) { [...] if (cool == AWESOME) { [...] } } }
-
If-statements
Always use curly braces.
Example
if(condition) { /*always use curly braces even if the 'if' only has one statement*/ DoJustThisOneThing(); } if(argv[i][2] == 'h' && /*split 'if' conditions to multiple lines if the conditions are long */ argv[i][3] == 'e' && /*or if it makes things more readable. */ argv[i][4] == 'l' && argv[i][5] == 'p') { /*example taken from args parsing code*/ /* code */ } else if(condition) { /* code */ } else { /* code */ }
-
Switch-statements
Always keep the break statement last in the case, after any code blocks.
Example
switch(state) { case 1: { /* even if the case only has one line, use curly braces (similar reasoning as with if's) */ doA(1); } break; /* separate cases with a line */ case 2: /* unless it falls into the next one */ case 3: { DoThisFirst(); } /* no break, this one also falls through */ case 4: { /* notice that curly braces line up with 'case' on line above */ int b = 2; doA(b); } break; /* putting 'break' on this line saves some room and makes it look a little nicer */ case 5: { /* more code */ } break; default: /* It is nice to always have a default case, even if it does nothing */ { InvalidDefaultCase(); /* or whatever, it depends on what you are trying to do. */ } }
-
Line length
There's no hard limit but if possible keep lines shorter than 80 characters.
For those of you who use vim, add this to your vimrc to ensure proper indenting.
"####Indentation settings
:filetype plugin indent on
" show existing tab with 4 spaces width
:set tabstop=4
" when indenting with '>', use 4 spaces width
:set shiftwidth=4
" On pressing tab, insert 4 spaces
:set expandtab
" fix indentation problem with types above function name
:set cinoptions+=t0
" fix indentation of { after case
:set cinoptions+==0
" fix indentation of multiline if
:set cinoptions+=(0 "closing ) to let vimrc hylighting work after this line
"see http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/indent.html#cinoptions-values
"for more indent optionsindent [FILE] -npcs -i4 -bl -Tcst_wave -Tcst_wave_header -Tcst_rateconv \
-Tcst_voice -Tcst_item -Tcst_features -Tcst_val -Tcst_va -Tcst_viterbi \
-Tcst_utterance -Tcst_vit_cand_f_t -Tcst_vit_path_f_t -Tcst_vit_path \
-Tcst_vit_point -Tcst_string -Tcst_lexicon -Tcst_relation \
-Tcst_voice_struct -Tcst_track -Tcst_viterbi_struct -Tcst_vit_cand \
-Tcst_tokenstream -Tcst_tokenstream_struct -Tcst_synth_module \
-Tcst_sts_list -Tcst_lpcres -Tcst_ss -Tcst_regex -Tcst_regstate \
-Twchar_t -Tcst_phoneset -Tcst_lts_rewrites -Tlexicon_struct \
-Tcst_filemap -Tcst_lts_rules -Tcst_clunit_db -Tcst_cg_db \
-Tcst_audio_streaming_info -Tcst_audio_streaming_info_struct -Tcst_cart \
-Tcst_audiodev -TVocoderSetup -npsl -brs -bli0 -nut
see ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
See COPYING
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