tvraman/dectalk

Modern builds for the 90s/00s DECtalk text-to-speech application.

DECtalk

These files were shared by their original developer late Edward Bruckert on the DECtalk list in Oct/Nov 2015 and preserved on a HTTP server on datajake.braillescreen.net. Another developer also added more code in 09/2022 which is also preserved in the same location.

Try it out!

• Latest downloads on GitHub Actions
• Try it out in your web browser with WebAssembly

Community

We're currently living out in Discord - Come have a chat!

Branches of Interest

• master Literally just the source code dumped into the /src folder.
• develop Working Linux/Windows binaries (i386, x86_64 and aarch64), MacOS/iOS (Apple Silicon and Intel).

Building

Linux

Setting up on Ubuntu Linux

If you're building on Ubuntu, obtain the following dependencies:

apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libgtk2.0-dev unzip git

(libgtk2.0-dev is only needed if you want the graphical frontend, libasound2-dev if you want ALSA sound output and libpulse-dev if you want pulseaudio audio-output)

Compiling on Linux

# Run all these commands in the /src directory...
cd src

# Generates configure files
autoreconf -si

# Executes configure files
./configure

# Builds DECtalk with ALL cores (remove -j for single core)
make -j

The built files will be found in the /dist folder.

Compiling on Linux with Docker

To build DECtalk without setting up a local build environment, run sudo docker-compose up (and make sure you have Docker and docker-compose installed!)

Windows

Visual Studio 2022

Install Visual Studio 2022, enabling the "Desktop development with C++" workload from the Visual Studio Installer.

Optionally, also install the ARM64 build tools (untested) to create ARM64 binaries for Windows on ARM.

You can then open \src\DECtalk.sln in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 6

Setup

There's a great article on CodeProject which explains how to install Visual Studio 6.0 from scratch. Read it here

You will also need to add your vcvars32.bat file to the environment variables. Do this by adding C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin to your Windows system PATH.

Compilation

The \devops\vs6\dt_buildall.bat file is a great place to get started if you want to build individual components of DECtalk.

If you want to compile all files, execute the \devops\vs6\dt_buildall.bat file from the root of the project folder.

You can then collate all files together by executing the \devops\vs6\dt_copyfiles.bat file.

MacOS

Xcode command line tools

Setup

Install Xcode command line tools. From the terminal:

% xcode-select --install

Or you may trigger an install by typing any of the following from the terminal:

git

clang

gcc

Compilation

cd src/
./configure
make -j

The built files will be found in the /dist folder.

The Team