Enabling a robot to speak
With the ability to speak, your robot can take on a personality of its own. There are multiple styles of voices available for your robot, and its ability to carry on a conversation is only limited by your imagination.
The two current methods of providing the capability for your robot to speak are analogous to the speech recognition abilities mentioned in the previous section. The ROS package sound_play (from the audio-common metapackage) offers one method and the Rospeex software provides another.
The ROS package sound_play supports playing built-in sound files, OGG and WAV files, and processing speech synthesis data produced via Festival. Festival is a text-to-speech (TTS) ability developed by the University of Edinburgh. Multiple languages are supported through this project and the companion Festvox project at CMU. More information on these speech synthesis projects can be found at:
