Latin Text-to-Speech

Sometimes I encounter Classical Latin in my reading. I don’t know Latin, which is fine, but it bothers me that I can’t even pronounce it. I’ve also wanted to include the Latin version of the Geneva Catechism, Catechismus Ecclesiae Genevensis, in catechism.app. The app includes a feature to read catechisms aloud, and I decided to use this to practice my Latin pronunciation. There’s just one problem: I used iOS VoiceOver to implement this, and VoiceOver doesn’t support Latin. Nuts!

I essentially followed the approach described here: Classical Latin TTS – An (in)elegant solution to the dearth of quality latin audio It uses the Espeak TTS, mbrola, a Latin voice for mbrola, and a Python app for producing a “Macronized” version of your input text. This was a struggle on MacOS, so I used VirtualBox and Debian. The result is inferior to Apple’s VoiceOver, but it’s certainly good enough to practice my Latin pronunciation. I’m happy.