spd-say -L returns Failed to get voice list

[themreza]

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04, and I have Speech Dispatcher 0.9.1 installed.

After installing Pied and downloading a voice, I could confirm that spd-say "test" worked fine, but spd-say -L returned the Failed to get voice list. error. For this particular version of Speech Dispatcher, an empty voice list prevents Firefox's Reader View mode from functioning normally. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/speechd-setup

I noticed that spd-say -o piper -L didn't have this issue, so it hinted that the Piper module was probably not being selected as the default output. I then tried adding DefaultModule piper to ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, and it fixed the issue:

$ killall speech-dispatcher
$ spd-say -L
                     NAME                 LANGUAGE                  VARIANT
                    Piper                    en-us                    MALE1

This issue is most likely specific to older versions of Speech Dispatcher, before this fix was released. An alternative solution is to find a backported binary or to build the binary manually, but for me, this was the quickest fix, so I thought I should share it here in case someone else faces the same issue.

[Elleo]

Hi @themreza,

That's great, thanks for figuring that out! I'll include it in the configuration template for the next release