Generate audio books from text documents

pip install jmes-tts

This project requires Python 3.12 and uses uv to manage dependencies.

You can create a virtual environment with all the necessary dependencies by running:

uv sync --all-extras --dev

This will install all necessary dependencies and install this project in editable mode.

You can activate the venv with:

. .venv/bin/activate

Poe the Poet is the task runner used for this project, it's automatically installed as part of the dev dependencies. To see a list of available tasks, run the poe command with no args.

To run the tests for this project run:

poe test

Before submitting a PR, ensure the prcheck task runs successfully:

poe prcheck

The jmes-tts command is the main interface for converting text to speech. It offers several options to customize the conversion process.

jmes-tts --text "Hello, world!" --output hello.mp3

This will convert the text "Hello, world!" to speech and save it as "hello.mp3".

• --filename: Input file to convert to speech
• --text: Text to convert to speech
• --bucket: S3 bucket for long-form text (optional)
• --output: Output audio file (default: output.mp3)
• --language: Language of phrase (default: english)
• --language-code: Language code override (optional)
• --voice: Voice to use for text-to-speech (optional)
• --engine: TTS engine (optional)
• --list-languages: List language presets and Polly language codes

Supported --language values:

• english (default)
• french
• spanish
• cantonese
• mandarin

Run jmes-tts --list-languages to see all presets and the full list of supported language codes.

For longer texts, you can specify an S3 bucket and the path to a local file:

jmes-tts --filename long_text.txt --bucket my-s3-bucket --output long_audio.mp3

• You must provide either --filename or --text, but not both.
• If your text is larger than 3000 (billable) characters, you need to provide the --bucket argument. Otherwise synchronous TTS will be used.
• If no output file is specified, the audio will be saved as output.mp3 in the current directory.