Local TTS

Based on our experience during the last Mexican Tournament of Robotics, internet connection tends to be a problem in the competition area. Not only the internet was unavailable, but the connection was often slow, making a poor experience for the users. This is why we decided to implement a local TTS system.

Piper

Piper is a fast, local neural TTS system. It contains a variety of pre-trained models in many supported languages.

Currently, there are 2 implementations to run Piper:

1. Install piper library using pip
2. Install piper by compiling from source

For laptop users, the dockerfile supports the first implementation, which is more straigthforward. For Nvidia Jetson, the second implementation is recommended because using the pre-built wheel sometimes yielded errors, which were fixed by compiling from source.