Install Flite and asterisk-flite (non-rpm method)

Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast run-time synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers. Flite is designed as an alternative synthesis engine to Festival for voices built using the FestVox suite of voice building tools.
asterisk-flite is a Flite text-to-speech module for the Asterisk open-source PBX. This provides the "Flite" dialplan application, which allows you to use the Flite TTS Engine with Asterisk. It invokes the Flite TTS engine locally via the Flite C API, and uses it to render text to speech.

Please refer to the asterisk-flite project's web page at: http://asterisk-flite.sourceforge.net for the latest instructions.

1. cd /tmp
2. wget http://asterisk-flite.sourceforge.net/extras/flite-1.3-sharedlibs.patch
3. wget http://asterisk-flite.sourceforge.net/extras/flite-1.3-alsa_support.patch
4. wget http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/packed/flite-1.3/flite-1.3-release.tar.gz
5. wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/asterisk-flite/asterisk-flite-0.5.tar.gz
6. tar -zxvf flite-1.3-release.tar.gz
7. rm -f flite-1.3-release.tar.gz
8. cd flite-1.3-release
9. patch -p1 < ../flite-1.3-sharedlibs.patch
10. patch -p1 < ../flite-1.3-alsa_support.patch
11. ./configure --enable-shared
12. make
13. make install
14. cd ../
15. tar -xzvf asterisk-flite-0.5.tar.gz
16. rm -f asterisk-flite-0.5.tar.gz
17. mv asterisk-flite-0.5 flite-1.3-release/
18. cd flite-1.3-release/asterisk-flite-0.5
19. make
20. make install
    1. Verify that there is now a app_flite.so file in /usr/lib/asterisk/modules/
21. nano /etc/ld.so.conf
    1. make sure that /usr/local/lib is in there. Add it if need be and save file.
22. ldconfig
23. asterisk -rx 'restart now'
24. asterisk -r
    1. show application Flite

If all goes well you should have Flite support. Tested on 2 of my Gentoo systems.

Test asterisk-flite

To test it, I simply put it in your extensions.conf file:

 exten => 123,1,Flite(this is a test. this is only a test. if this had been an actual emergency, you would be dead.)

And then try calling 123 or whatever extension you set it to.

See also

• app_flite for Asterisk 1.6.x
• Flite tutorial with Asterisk@Home
• Flite news
• Festival
• Asterisk festival installation
• TTS: Text-to-Speech solutions
• asterisk-agi-audiotx: AGI extension module that adds commands to allow the transfer of audio files to and from Asterisk via an AGI session
• asterisk-espeak: dialplan application providing speech synthesis using the eSpeak text-to-speech engine