bard-cli 0.2.0

bard is a text to speech tool based on existing open-source models (local install) and APIs to install on your desktop

Bard

Bard is a text to speech client that integrates on the desktop

Install

Install libraries or system-specific dependencies:

sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev xclip #  portaudio19-dev becomes portaudio with Homebrew
sudo apt install libcairo-dev libgirepository1.0-dev gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1  # Ubuntu ONLY (not needed on MacOS)
pip install PyGObject # Ubuntu ONLY (not needed on MacOS)

Install the main app

pip install bard-cli

Install optional dependencies

pip install openai

(at the moment openai is the only backend so you better have it installed ;))

GNOME

On GNOME desktop you can subsequently run:

scribe-install [...] --openai-api-key $OPENAI_API_KEY

to produce a .desktop file for GNOME's quick-launch (the [...] indicates any argument that bard takes)

Usage

In a terminal:

bard

which defaults to:

bard --backend openaiapi --voice allow --model tts-1

(this assumes the environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY is defined)

An icon should show up almost immediately in the system tray, with options to copy the content of the clipboard (the last thing you copy-pasted) and send that to the AI model for reading aloud.

For testing you can also start the app with

bard --default-file /path/to/audio.mp3

Or resume the previous recording:

bard --resume

Unless you removed your (local) traces:

bard --clean-cache-on-exit

Player

The player was devised in conversation with Mistral's Le Chat and Open AI's Chat GPT, and my own experience with pystray on scribe. It works.

I'm open for suggestion for other, platform-independent integrations to the OS.

Roadmap

Include more backends including local ones.