⌨️ ➜ 🔊 Offline Text to Speech Application

Your private offline Text-To-Speech app for Android, Linux, Windows. The application is made with Kivy and KivyMD on Python.

Overview: The app uses KivyMD and Kivy mainly for the AI Chatbot UI. It mainly uses PiperTTS on Desktop environments and native Android-TTS on Android platform.

📽️ Demo

You can click on the below Image or this Youtube Link to see the demo. Please let me know in the comments, how do you feel about this App.

🖧 Our Scematic Architecture

To be added...

🧑‍💻 Quickstart Guide

📱 Download & Run the Android App

You can check the Releases and downlaod the latest version of the android app on your phone.

If you use the Download button from the app, you can save the selected audio (.wav) in one of the mentioned folders: Downloads, Music, Podcasts, Recordings or Ringtones due android file access restrictions. It defaults to TTS folder in Music.

If you have a Samsung phone (or some other brand's phone) which doesn't have Google as default text-to-speech engine. You may change it to google to get more voices. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Talkback > Settings > text-to-speech settings> Preferred engine > then choose Google as default engine. If you do not find this path, directly search text-to-speech settings in Settings.

🐍 Run with Python

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/daslearning-org/text-to-speech-offline.git

2. Download the voice files like onnx & onnx.json from HuggingFace and place those files in models. You can choose your voices, both onnx & onnx.json will be required.

3. Run the application

cd text-to-speech-offline/kivy/
pip install -r requirements.txt # virtual environment is recommended
python main.py

🦾 Build your own App

The Kivy project has a great tool named Buildozer which can make mobile apps for Android & iOS

📱 Build Android App

A Linux environment is recommended for the app development. If you are on Windows, you may use WSL or any Virtual Machine. As of now the buildozer tool works on Python version 3.11 at maximum. I am going to use Python 3.11.

# add the python repository
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt update

# install all dependencies.
sudo apt install -y ant autoconf automake ccache cmake g++ gcc git lbzip2 libffi-dev libltdl-dev libtool libssl-dev make openjdk-17-jdk patch patchelf pkg-config python3-pip python3.11 python3.11-venv python3.11-dev unzip wget zip

# optionally you may check the java installation with below commands
java -version
javac -version

# install python modules
git clone https://github.com/daslearning-org/text-to-speech-offline.git
cd text-to-speech-offline/kivy/
python3.9 -m venv .env # create python virtual environment
source .env/bin/activate
pip install -r req_android.txt

# build the android apk
buildozer android debug # this may take a good amount of time for the first time & will generate the apk in the bin directory

## build AAB for playstore (may require some rework)
# generate a key
export APP_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD="yourpassword"
export APP_ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD="yourpassword"
keytool -genkey -v -keystore your_key.jks -alias your_alias -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 -storepass $APP_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD -keypass $APP_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD -dname "CN=SomnathDas, OU=IT, O=DasLearning, L=Kolkata, ST=WB, C=IN" # this is one time activity for the app

# set the below in buildozer.spec
android.sign = True
android.keystore = /path/to/your_key.jks
android.key.alias = your_alias
android.release_artifact = aab

# then build the aab
buildozer -v android release

🖳 Build Computer Application (Windows / Linux / MacOS)

A Python virtual environment is recommended and please follow the same steps from above till the pip module installations (do not require buildozer for desktop apps). It builds a native app depending on the OS type i.e. .exe if you are running PyInstaller from a Windows machine. Build computer apps from docker image for any OS type.

# install pyinstaller
pip install pyinstaller

# generate the spec file
pyinstaller --name "dasLearningTTS" --windowed --onefile main.py # optional as it is already create in the repo

# then update the spec file as needed
# then build your app which will be native to the OS i.e. Linux or Windows or MAC
pyinstaller dasLearningTTS.spec

Build Windows exe from Linux

• Install Wine

# Add the Wine repository key
sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key

# Add the Wine repository for your Linux Mint version
# For Linux Mint 21.x (Vanessa, Virginia, Victoria - based on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish)
# Replace 'jammy' with your Ubuntu base codename if different (e.g., 'focal' for Mint 20.x)
sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/jammy/winehq-jammy.sources

# Update package lists
sudo apt update

# Install Wine (Stable branch is usually recommended)
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

# If you need 32-bit support (highly recommended for Python/PyInstaller compatibility)
# This command typically handles it, but if you encounter issues later, ensure 32-bit architecture is enabled:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install wine32 # This might be pulled by winehq-stable, but good to ensure

• Download Windows Python from official page and then install

# Navigate to where you downloaded the Python installer
cd ~/Downloads

# Run the installer using wine
# Replace 'python-3.9.13-amd64.exe' with the actual filename you downloaded
wine python-3.9.13-amd64.exe

• Then run the development

cd kivy/
wine pip install pyinstaller
wine pip install -r requirements.txt
# Also install kivy-deps.sdl2, kivy-deps.glew, kivy-deps.angle explicitly if not pulled by Kivy/KivyMD
wine pip install kivy-deps.sdl2 kivy-deps.glew kivy-deps.angle

# Replace 'Python39' with your installed Python version in Wine
wine pyinstaller dasLearningTTS.spec # exe will be in the dist folder

🐞 Issues

There can be few issues & some solutions around it.

Android Issues

• Sometimes the apk might not get installed. You may enable Developer Options > USB Debugging and run below command with adb tool.

# check your packages (it may not show the uninstalled version, some leftover may cause the issue)
adb shell pm list packages | grep ttsstt

# uninstall cleans it
adb uninstall in.daslearning.ttsstt

# you may use buildozer deploy run to check the adb
buildozer android debug deploy run