Cepstral Support - Telephony Product Support | Linux

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We encourage customers to download Cepstral voices before purchasing activation keys. This ensures that the voice works properly with your telephony system. This is especially important as we have a strict no refund policy. Voices come fully functional, but you will hear a gentle reminder to activate your voice before any synthesis until you purchase the applicable activation keys from our online store.

Download Your Voice

You can find Cepstral voice installer download links on our downloads page.

Install Your Voice

Installing Cepstral 6 is straightforward:

Download your desired voice from our Downloads area.

Extract the archive, e.g. tar -xvzf Cepstral_Allison-8kHz_x86-64-linux_6.0.1.tar.gz

Change directory to the extracted directory, e.g. cd Cepstral_Allison-8kHz_x86-64-linux_6.0

Run the install script with elevated privileges, e.g. sudo sh install.sh

Purchase Your Activation Keys

All activation keys can be purchased online at the Cepstral web store.

Enter Your Voice Activation Key

You can enter your activation key using the command-line swift utility. The swift executable can be found at [install path]/bin/swift. (The default path is /opt/swift/bin/swift.)

To register a voice using the swift executable, call swift with the '--reg-voice' switch. You will be prompted to enter your name, your company name, the name of the voice you wish to register, and then the activation key.

swift --reg-voice Your Name: John Q. Public Company (if applicable): Acme Widgets Voice: David License Key: xx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx

You will receive feedback regarding the validity of your entries. If the information is valid, the voice will no longer contain reminders.

Additionally, you can use the '-d' or '-n' switches to directly register a particular voice based on it's install directory or voice name. In this case, you will not be prompted to enter the name of the voice to register. swift --reg-voice -d /opt/swift/voices/David
or swift --reg-voice -n David Your Name: John Q. Public Company (if applicable): Acme Widgets License Key: xx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx
NOTE: The voice must be registered by the user that installed the voice. If the voice was installed by root, you must register it as root.

Enter a Save to File Activation Key

Use the swift command line tool (with the '--reg-filewrite' switch) to register your activation key to save audio data. You will be prompted to enter your name, your company name, and then the activation key.

Command:

sudo swift --reg-filewrite Your Name: John Q. Public Company (if applicable): Acme Widgets License Key: xx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx

You will receive feedback regarding the validity of your entries. If the information is valid, your license to save synthesis will be active immediately.

Enter Concurrency Ports Activation Key

To register purchased concurrency ports use the swift command line tool (with the '--reg-ports' switch) to register your concurrency license. You will be prompted to enter your name, your company name, the number of ports you wish to register, and then the license key.

Command:


sudo swift --reg-ports

	                  Your Name: John Q. Public

            Company (if applicable): Acme Widgets

Number of ports (blank = unlimited): 8

                        License Key: xx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx

You will receive feedback regarding the validity of your entries. If the information is valid, your concurrency license will be active immediately.

Using Your Voice

You can use the included command line program called "Swift," which can perform several functions, such as saving the spoken output to a wav file.

Open a command shell in your operating system. Please note which directory you're in, as that is where Swift will look for text files to read (again, unless otherwise specified).

To hear Swift speak aloud, type:

swift "hello world"

To speak aloud with a specific Cepstral voice installed on your system (Emily for example), type:

swift -n Emily "hello world"

To learn more about the swift command, type swift and hit enter.

What versions of Linux are supported in Cepstral 6?

At this time, we offer binary distributions for i386 and x86_64 machines. If you are still deciding which Linux distro to use, we recommend CentOS. Cepstral 6 voices have also been successfully installed on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, and Open SuSE.

How do I use Cepstral 6 with Asterisk?

Cepstral recommends using dOpenSource's fork of app_swift. App_swift is an open source project that connects Asterisk with Cepstral's TTS engine, Swift. Since changes were made to our API in Cepstral 6, some minor changes had to be made to app_swift. The Cepstral 6 compatible app_swift can now be found on GitHub. app_swift has been tested with Cepstral 6 and Asterisk 1.4 through Asterisk 16 - including Asterisk Certified.

The installation instructions are as follows:

Install a version of Asterisk and at least one Cepstral 6 telephony voice.

Download the app_swift archive: git clone https://github.com/dOpensource/app_swift

Change directory to the appropriate app_swift for the installed version of Asterisk:

cd app_swift/Asterisk_10 or cd app_swift/Asterisk_1.8 or cd app_swift/Asterisk_1.6

make

make install

Restart Asterisk to load the app_swift module: asterisk -rx "core restart now"

asterisk -rx "core show application swift"

If the application was found, then you are good to go.
If not, then most likely the path for the swift library was not found. Running the following usually does the trick:

sudo echo "/opt/swift/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/swift.conf; ldconfig

Don't forget to restart Asterisk again to reload the app_swift module.

The dialplan function swift will call the TTS engine from Asterisk. Edit exentions.conf as follows:

[my-phones] exten =>2000,1,NoOp() same =>n,swift(This is a test of Cepstral's TTS in Asterisk) same =>n, Hangup()

What are the hardware requirements for Cepstral 6?

Cepstral 6 is a little more demanding than Cepstral 5.1. This is a necessary quality/performance trade-off. However, the exact hardware required depends on the number of concurrent syntheses. Please Contact Us if you have specific questions.

How do I use Cepstral 6 with Asterisk?

Cepstral recommends using dOpenSource's fork of app_swift. App_swift is an open source project that connects Asterisk with Cepstral's TTS engine, Swift. Since changes were made to our API in Cepstral 6, some minor changes had to be made to app_swift. The Cepstral 6 compatible app_swift can now be found on GitHub. app_swift has been tested with Cepstral 6 and Asterisk 1.4 through Asterisk 16 - including Asterisk Certified.

The installation instructions are as follows:

Install a version of Asterisk and at least one Cepstral 6 telephony voice.

Download the app_swift archive: git clone https://github.com/dOpensource/app_swift

Change directory to the appropriate app_swift for the installed version of Asterisk:

cd app_swift/Asterisk_10 or cd app_swift/Asterisk_1.8 or cd app_swift/Asterisk_1.6

make

make install

Restart Asterisk to load the app_swift module: asterisk -rx "core restart now"

asterisk -rx "core show application swift"

If the application was found, then you are good to go.
If not, then most likely the path for the swift library was not found. Running the following usually does the trick:

sudo echo "/opt/swift/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/swift.conf; ldconfig

Don't forget to restart Asterisk again to reload the app_swift module.

The dialplan function swift will call the TTS engine from Asterisk. Edit exentions.conf as follows:

[my-phones] exten =>2000,1,NoOp() same =>n,swift(This is a test of Cepstral's TTS in Asterisk) same =>n, Hangup()