Playback Speed

[transcendtient]

Is there any way to change the global reading speed? I tried modifying the speech-dispatcher "DefaultRate", but there was no change. I'm on Kubunutu LTS.

[Elleo]

Hi @transcendtient,

If you install sox Pied will make use of that to alter the rate based on the speech-dispatcher rate parameter. Eventually I'm planning a more sophisticated daemon to handle that internally, but this provides a workaround for now.

Cheers,
Mike

[C-Loftus]

Just curious, has anyone had success on getting this set up? I was hoping to change playback speed in Firefox but wasn't sure which options to change for sox.

I ran sudo apt install sox and then if I tried to read a webpage via firefox's TTS, nothing is spoken and the visual cursor that shows up in the immersive reader mode skims very fast throught the page (almost as if it is skipping the text). If I uninstall sox the piper voice plays back like normal. (So playing speech works, just not speeding it up or using sox)

I am on Ubuntu 24.04

[Department-stack]

I would like this feature as well

[Department-stack]

I found a solution

In /home/usernamehere/.var/app/com.mikeasoft.pied/data/pied/models

Open the appropriate .json file for the model that you wish. Example: en_US-danny-low.onnx.json

Use a text editor. to change the "length_scale" value

By default it will be "length_scale":1,
"length_scale":0.5, will increase the speed by 50%
"length_scale":1.5, will decrease the speed by 50%

Change it to your liking, personally I like "length_scale":0.75, Don't forget to save once you modified the value!

[C-Loftus]

Interestingly, if I run sudo apt install sox I can indeed change the rate of speech for piper when used in the Orca screen reader. So perhaps the firefox in-browser TTS that uses speech dispatcher is not supported for some reason.

While changing the value in the file is a cool trick, it would be best to get clarity regarding how the rate should be changed and if there are any limitations.