Asterisk Flite

Install Flite and asterisk-flite (in RHEL, CentOS and similar)

Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast run-time synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers. Flite is designed as an alternative synthesis engine to Festival for voices built using the FestVox suite of voice building tools.
asterisk-flite is a Flite text-to-speech module for the Asterisk open-source PBX. This provides the “Flite” dialplan application, which allows you to use the Flite Text-to Speech Engine with Asterisk. It invokes the Flite Text-to Speech engine locally via the Flite C API, and uses it to render text to speech.

We need to add the epel repo for flite packages
For CentOS 5:

1. wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
2. rpm -Uvh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

For CentOS 6:

1. wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
2. rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

1. yum install flite flite-devel

Then we download and install the asterisk flite plugin:

1. cd /usr/src
2. wget http://github.com/downloads/zaf/Asterisk-Flite/asterisk-flite-2.1-flite1.3.tar.gz
3. tar xf asterisk-flite-2.1-flite1.3.tar.gz
4. cd asterisk-flite-2.1-flite1.3
5. make && make install && make samples
6. asterisk -rx “module load app_flite”
7. asterisk -rx “core show application like flite”

Test asterisk-flite

To test it, I simply put it in your extensions.conf file:

exten => 123,1,Flite(this is a test. this is only a test. if this had been an actual emergency, you would be dead.)

And then try calling 123 or whatever extension you set it to.

See also

• Flite tutorial with Asterisk@Home
• Festival
• Asterisk festival installation
• ((Text-to Speech (((Text-to Speech (((Text-to Speech (((Text-to Speech (((Text-to Speech (TTS))))))): Text-to-Speech solutions
• asterisk-agi-audiotx: AGI extension module that adds commands to allow the transfer of audio files to and from Asterisk via an AGI session
• asterisk-espeak: dialplan application providing speech synthesis using the eSpeak text-to-speech engine
• Flite for Asterisk 11 with support for pronunciation exceptions