Let your Linux terminal communicate its thoughts

Greetings from one other day in our 24-day-long Linux command-line toys creation calendar. If that is your first go to to the sequence, you may be asking your self what a command-line toy even is. We’re figuring that out as we go, however typically, it might be a recreation, or any easy diversion that helps you might have enjoyable on the terminal.

We hope that even when you’ve seen a few of these earlier than, there might be one thing new for everyone in our sequence.

Some of chances are you’ll be too younger to recollect, however earlier than there was Alexa, Siri, or the Google Assistant, computer systems nonetheless had voices.

Many of us will always remember HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odessey helpfully conversing with the crew (sorry, Dave). But between 1960s science fiction and at present, there was an entire technology of talking computer systems. Some of them nice, most of them, not so nice.

One of my favorites is the open supply undertaking eSpeak. It’s out there in lots of kinds, together with a library model you should use to incorporate speech expertise in your individual undertaking, but it surely additionally coms as a command-line program you could set up and use simply. In my distribution, this was so simple as:

$ sudo dnf set up espeak

Invoking eSpeak then may be invoked both interactively, or by piping textual content to it utilizing the output of one other program or a easy echo command. There are a variety of voice files out there for eSpeak, and when you’re particularly bored over the vacations, you may even create your individual.

A fork of eSpeak referred to as eSpeak NG (“Next Generation”) was created in 2015 from some builders who needed to proceed growth of the in any other case lightly-updated eSpeak. eSpeak is made out there as open supply underneath a GPL model three license, and you could find out extra concerning the undertaking and obtain the supply code on SourceForge.

I am going to additionally throw in a bonus toy at present, cava. Because I have been keen to offer every of those articles a novel screenshot because the lead picture, and at present’s toy outputs sound somewhat than one thing visible, I wanted to seek out one thing to fill the area. Short for “console-based audio visualizer for ALSA” (though it helps extra than simply ALSA now), cava is a pleasant MIT-licensed terminal audio visualization instrument that is enjoyable to observe. Below, is a visualization of eSpeak’s output of the next:

$ echo "Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, had a very shiny nose." | espeak

Do you might have a favourite command-line toy that you simply we must always have included? Our calendar is principally set for the rest of the sequence, however we might nonetheless like to function some cool command-line toys within the new yr. Let me know within the feedback under, and I am going to test it out. And let me know what you considered at present’s amusement.

Be certain to take a look at yesterday’s toy, Solve a puzzle at the Linux command line with nudoku, and are available again tomorrow for an additional!