*Install festival. This will speak the text you select.

apt-get install festival

*Install xsel. This program allows you to pass what you selected into a talk.sh from your graphic interface. In my case I use gnome shell, so when you are in a email or website or reading long marketing notes and you select your text you just press alt+s and computer will speak(say) it to you.

*Lets install xsel.

apt-get install xsel

*Now create a little bash script that passes what you selected to festival

cd /home/lucas

vi talk.sh



*And paste these lines

#!/bin/bash

xsel | festival --tts --pipe



*In order to being able to execute it we need to give it execute permission.

chmod +x talk.sh

*Now you are ready. We just need to add our talk.sh to our keyboard shortcuts. In gnome shell : Search for

System Settings

then press keyboard

then press Shortcuts

then press +



Add keyboard shortcut.

Name: TTS (Text To Speech)

Command: /home/lucas/talk.sh

*And set it for

alt + s

aka Alt + SPEAK!

*You are ready to go. Select some text and press alt+s. (I have noticed that sometimes you need to press and hold s for about 1sec for it to work when there is more text selected.

*Watch a quick video that was very helpful:

*Some notes on the voice. The default festival voice is the most versatile when it comes to reading. I have tried other voices but they are incomplete when it comes to some words. I was surprised that this can read almost every word. You can try other languages here. While I read that Japanese American might be a good replacement. The default festival voice was very easy to get used to. In 1 day I catch up on all the marketing notes. So have the computer read to you and get back to business.

While you are still here help me request this talk.sh being included in all Debian installations by default and keyboard shortcut set to alt+s (alt+speak)

*Enjoy! text-to-speech on Debian Linux