Akregator natural text-to-speech reader?

[pemartins]

In Akregator I'm only getting a robotic tts voice (kal16 or something alike), is there a way of having a natural text-to-speech voice?

I browsed around and found some info on stuff like festival, mbrola and kttsd but I had no success at all with those because I really understood nothing about the subject and had no idea of what I was doing.

[pemartins]

If someone knows how to change the default voice in Akregator please let me know. Meanwhile I built myself a solution that works not only in Akregator but also with every selected text anywhere (I think).

So first of all I found a very good natural female english voice. Run this line in the terminal for installation:

sudo apt-get install festival festvox-us-slt-hts

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After, set the installed voice along with festival as the default voice for festival. Make a backup of the file /etc/festival.scm then edit it with kate and add this line to the end of the file:

(set! voice_default 'voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts)

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Save it.

Now let's make the reading aloud script. Create the script file to be used in a convenient directory, in example name it "read.sh" and place it in a directory for scripts (mine is in the home folder in a folder called "Scripts").
Open that just created "read.sh" file with kate and copy the following into it:

#! /bin/bash
xsel | festival --tts --pipe

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Save it.
Right click the file, choose "Properties", go to "Permissions" tab and check "Is executable" and click "OK".

Now if you select text like in a Firefox webpage or in Akregator and run that "read.sh" script, it will be read out loud.

For convenience you can set a keyboard shortcut to run that "read.sh" file. Go to System Settings > Workspace > Shortcuts > Custom Shortcuts, click on Edit > New > Global Shortcut > Command/URL, give it a name like "Read" or something alike, on the tab "Action" in Command/URL click the folder icon and search for the "read.sh" file.
Now go to the "Trigger" folder and choose a shortcut to be used, click on "None" or in the existing shortcut and enter the key combination you desire. I choose Windows keys plus R.
Click "Apply on the bottom right corner.
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It's set, just select some text and test it.