Alba Habla

A fun little wrapper around your OS's speech synthesizer

Alba Habla simply repeats what you type through your local speech synthesizer. It was originally made as a "game" for a 2 year old named Alba :) (backstory here)

$ alba_habla
What shall I say?

Your system will need either say or espeak installed (if you're on a Mac, say should already be installed).

$ gem install alba_habla

$ alba_habla -h

Usage: alba_habla [options]
    -b, --books=BOOK_PATH        Path to folder with book files
    -v, --voice=VOICE            Voice to be used by your speech synthesizer

-b, --books=BOOK_PATH (defaults to current directory)

The "read" subcommand uses this path to look for books (a.k.a. text files, possibly containing the text of some well known childrens' stories). Example:

$ ls books/
green_eggs_and_ham.txt             the_cat_in_the_hat.txt

$ alba_habla --books=books/
What shall I say? read green_eggs_and_ham.txt
I am Sam
Sam I am

That Sam-I-am
That Sam-I-am!
...

-v, --voice=VOICE

This option determines the voice your OS's speech synthesizer will use. Behind the scenes we just pass this param directly to say or espeak.

If you are using say you can view your installed voices by running

$ say -v?

If you are using espeak you can view your installed voices by running

$ espeak --voices

read - this command opens a given file and feeds it, line by line, into the speech synthesizer. The path where Alba Habla looks for the file can be set via the --books option.

Note: to exit the program, just enter "bye".