how to add text to speech on GPT4ALL? To make GPT4ALL read the answers it generates

[SyamsQ]

how to add text to speech on GPT4ALL? To make GPT4ALL read the answers it generates

[mounta11n]

You could add a systemwide/global speech/tts functionality to your computer and assign a keyboard shortcut to read/speak a selected text.
That's what I have done and I highly recommend this approach.

I would suggest to install and setup piper. You will additionally need a voice model for piper (ONNX). The ONNX model consists of two parts: One *.onnx file and one *.onnx.json file.

You can find piper voices for example here on huggingface.

And here is my script playSelectedTTS.sh that you can take as a template or starting point:

#!/bin/bash

set -eo pipefail

dir="$(dirname $0)"

# define your models path. replace
# the below with your real path
model="/mnt/backups/models/tts"

# specify a speaker of your choice
speaker="speaker_1"

# Note: the *.onnx.json file will give information about which frequency
# has to be used with which model. In my case it is 16 kHz for ramona_low
# and 22050 Hz for throsten_medium

# define the various speakers
case $speaker in
  speaker_1)
    model="$(model)/ramona/de_DE-ramona-low.onnx"
    echo_out="play -r 16000 -e signed-integer -b 16 -c 1 -t raw -"
    ;;
  speaker_2)
    model="$(model)/thorsten/thorsten-emo/de_DE-thorsten_emotional-medium.onnx"
    echo_out="play -r 22050 -e signed-integer -b 16 -c 1 -t raw -"
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Unknown Speaker: $speaker"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

# Optional:
# Instead of the "play" command from the SoX package you
# could also use the "aplay" command from the alsa utils package.
# In case of asla the command will look like this:
# `aplay -r 22050 -f S16_LE -t raw -`
#
# I recommend "play" from the "SoX" package, because it is available
# for both macos and linux.
#
# In case of macos we can also assume that "afplay" is installed.

# make sure you have xclip installed
# use primary selection so that we can get the currently selected text
data=$(xclip -out -selection primary)

# Debugging: print the length of data
#echo "Length of data: ${#data}"

if [ ${#data} -gt 2 ]; then

    # Debugging: data output
    echo "Data: $data"
    echo "$(date) data: $data" >> /tmp/piper.log &

    echo "$data" | "$dir"/piper --model "$model" --output_raw | $echo_out
else
    echo "No data available."
fi

Put the script in the same folder as piper and assign a shortcut to it - I can't tell you how to assign a keyboard shortcut, since this depends on the desktop environment you are using.

In my case with KDE Plasma it is under system settings -> keyboard -> shortcuts -> add new -> command or script ...
For example I added my script $HOME/apps/piper.d/playSelectedTTS.sh and assigned 'Meta+S' to it. So whenever I select a text, I simply have to press Meta+S and piper will immediately speak the text.

That's pretty much it.

Why do I recommend piper? Because it is really fast, relatively lightweight and easy to use – and at the same time the piper voices are "okay'ish", at least better than the macos built-in say command or the linux espeak command.

And I find this approach pretty good (instead a GPT4All feature) because it is not limited to one specific app. You can now let your computer speak whenever you want.
And btw you could also do the same for STT for example with whisper.

Edit: typos, layout, prettify

[SyamsQ]

I am Indonesian, but Piper has not Indonesia languange.