Thank you, I will definetely check it out.

A cron job would not be a bad idea.

given the number of stories I’ve heard (and experienced) about Bash’s tricky syntax leading to Bad Things,

Been there, done that!

Do you mean an option to choose between various tts methods?

But if others take the chance and it sticks around a bit, I’ll come around ;-)

Hey, like many bash scripts, this one is just a glorifief one-liner. But I use it everyday, I am biased, of course, but it is rather convenient, and prevents me from getting lost in rabbit holes.

Thanks, any feedback is appreciated.

And, as far as

send-your-text-to-Microsoft bit

goes, well, if MS wants a copy of Brothers Karamazov, they can save themselves the trouble and get it here , it is free https://www.gutenberg.org/

piper

Indeed piper performs very well. Thank you for the input, I will most certainly consider adding the option to select tts engine in the near future, piper sounds totally worth it.

Fair enough, you do you.

For the record, no rm -r in the script.

The only rm command, line 394: rm "${UEBERZUG_FIFO_MAGIC_TAPE}"

I totally undersand what you are saying. Initially, the original project used local text-to-speech, but was less than perfect, slower and cpu-costly.

You can check it out here https://gitlab.com/christosangel/sapo

Once a FOSS solution gets better and more usable, swapping the tts conversion is not a great deal.