Text-to-speech is not a new technology. Nevertheless, it can have amazing benefits for users with impaired vision, as well as for people who need to overcome various language-related barriers. Text-to-speech apps can be found in various forms ranging from stylish online services to usually simple desktop apps.
VoiceGen is a simple, free, and open-source text-to-speech conversion app for Linux. It can be used as a simple text reader app to boost your productivity, as a means for relaxation, or as a digital narrator for your video or learning tutorials.
Advantages of VoiceGen
While it’s not the best-looking app of this sort out there, VoiceGen gets the job done nicely. The main benefit of VoiceGen is it gives you access to various types of voice engines such as Streamlabs (Amazon Polly), and other both offline and online engines such as svox pico.
The app is extremely simple to use, provides various speed engines and voice options, and is even capable of saving the output files in case you need to export them for your projects.
What could be better
We already mentioned that it’s not exactly the best-looking app. The GUI is a bit dated, having a typical top toolbar that provides access to all of the app’s features and controls.
Even though it comes with support for multiple offline/online engines, the Streamlabs engine does come with a character limit, which is not all that great if you want to convert large texts to voice.
Conclusion
VoiceGen is a simple and honest little software for reading texts out loud. It can be installed on most Linux distributions via Flatpak, or directly on Arch Linux, Manjaro, and other Arch-based distributions via a simple command: “yay -S voicegen.”
