How to install and configure festival plugin in Pidgin

For those of you who are wondering what is festival, it is a speech synthesis software. It is available for linux too and one can use it to convert text into speech(audio). In this howto I will tell you about a festival plugin for Pidgin. You can actually hear your IMs/chats using it.

First in order to  install the plugin run this command.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-festival

Restart Pidgin and you are all set to go. If you don't hear a voice then you probably need to install a speaker. Run this command..

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-cache search festvox

and you will see a result similar to this.

This will install a desired speaker on your machine. If you mostly chat in english language then install an english speaker only because other don't work (at least they didn't work for me). Restart Pidgin and try again.

 If it doesn't work this time then it is probably some problem with Pidgin sound settings. I was having the same trouble and this is the fix I found. Go to Tools => Preferences => Sound

And change the method to command and enter the command

  esdplay %s

Take a look at this pic to fill the entries.

After this your festival plugin should work. If its not working then you can try these troubleshooting methods:

• You should probably try and run festival in a terminal. First of all run this command:

[shredder12]$ festival

after that you will see a festival terminal. Now run this command in that terminal

festival >  (SayText “hello”)

If you hear a voice saying hello... then it means that festival is working properly and you are probably  having some trouble with pidgin..

• After that you can check if you are able to hear sounds (beeps) from you pidgin by changing the preferences settings.

• If both of the above didn't work... then you may try changing the voice you have installed.