The Imitate TTS Service is a Linux daemon that provides a DBus interface for the mimic1 text to speech (TTS) engine.
Imitate TTS uses dbus-cxx to interface with DBus. Imitate also uses gstreamer and to play audio. Imitate uses mimic1 for the speech synthesis and voices. Imitate also uses glib2.0 for utility functions.
You will have to install dbus-cxx and mimic1 from source, but glib2.0, gstreamer-1.0 and gstreamer-audio-1.0 should all be in your distro's package manager.
Imitate TTS Service uses CMake for its build system.
To install the imitate-service binary, configuration files, and header files, run the following commands:
cmake CMakeLists.txt
make -j 4
sudo make install
There are a few compilation flags available to adjust for Imitate TTS, the most important being ENABLE_DEBUG which will turn on debug logging to syslog. Additionally, it is possible to save space by excluding certain voices from compilation. Take a look at CMakeLists.txt for more information.
The configuration for the service is stored in /etc/imitate/imitate.conf.
Prepared/pre-synthesized audio clips are stored in /etc/imitate/prepared.
This program should be run as root because it is a daemon.
imitate [ -h | -v | -d | -a ADDRESS ]
-h Show this usage text.
-d Start a new Imitate TTS Service daemon if one is not running already.
-v Display the current version of this program.
-a Connects the Imitate TTS Service to the specified bus given by ADDRESS.
If no options are supplied, a new Imitate TTS Service instance will be made unless another Imitate TTS Service instance is already running.
Daemonization will fail if another Imitate TTS Service instance is running.
The Imitate TTS service exposes a set of methods to the session DBus. These methods are detailed in the DBus introspection file ca.l5.expandingdev.ImitateTTS.xml that is in the res directory, or here.