How to get Pidgin to speak instant messages in Ubuntu and LinuxMint

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In this tutorial we will show you how to get Pidgin to speak instant messages in Ubuntu using Festival. For Pidgin, i think every linux user heard before about this popular instant messenger. For Festival, if you diden`t heard about before, it is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system that offers a full text to speech system

with various APIs, as well as an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is designed to support multiple languages, and comes with support for English (British and American pronunciation), Welsh, and Spanish. Voice packages exist for several other languages, such as Castilian Spanish, Czech, Finnish, Hindi, Italian, Marathi, Polish, Russian and Telugu.

Now before to start, if you don`t have Pidgin installed, doesn`t mater since Pidgin and Festival are dependencies of the plug-in, so will be installed automatically during the plug-in installation.

1- Install festival plugin for Pidgin

Open terminal and enter the following command, you can also install Festival from Ubuntu software center:

sudo apt-get install pidgin-festival

After installation is done, restart pidgin.

2- Activate and configure Festival plugin

Start Pidgin then go to Tools–>>plugins and activate festival

After, click configure plugin and setup

3- Install more Languages speakers

To install more languages speakers, open terminal and enter the following command:

sudo apt-cache search festvox

Output:

Is done.

For me worked perfectely without any issue. If you got any troubleshouting we can help you to resolve it. Just share your problem by commenting this post  or by using in our Forum.

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