How to use a more natural voice for Gnome's Orca screen reader

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Piper is a fast and local neural text-to-speech (TTS) engine, that offers a wide variety of voices in several languages.

In order to integrate Piper voices with Orca, we will use the Pied application — that makes it simple to install and manage TTS Piper voices for use with Speech Dispatcher —.

This enables us to download Piper voices, and then select them so that they show up in Orca's preferences "Speech synthetizer" option.

Install Pied application

Notice in regards to existing Speech dispatcher configuration

Before you go any further, I would advise you to check whether you already have some ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/ directory on your computer. If you do I would recommend you to back it up.

Indeed it seems, that currently, Pied wipes the existing configuration. Although the application prompts you with a warning and ask you to confirm the override, you may overlook this and lose your existing configuration.
So far, and if I read correctly the recovery process, once you confirmed the override, is rather manual.

You may want to look at these two Github links:

Although, I did not have a previously configured Speech dispatcher, what I observed is that once I assigned a Piper voice to Orca thanks to Pied, my only way to revert back to horrendous Orca's default voice was to delete the ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/ directory and have a computer restart.
In my case that was not a big deal, but for some of you it may be.

Pied installation options

To install Pied, you have two options:

  1. Install the Snap package
  2. Get the Pied flatpak package and install it running sudo flatpak install com.mikeasoft.pied.flatpak

Download voice of your choice

Once Pied installed, you can open the Pied application and explore to download the voice you fancy.

It is as simple as picking a language, browsing through the available voices for this language, hitting the play button to hear a sample, hit the "Download" button.

Now restart your computer.

Select the voice

Open the Pied application and hit the "Select voice" on the voice entry of your liking, e.g "Cori — Medium".

Assign the voice to Orca

In case Orca is already running, you may need to kill it first and launch it again.

You can achieve this by running killall orca in your Terminal application or via Gnome's Run dialog.
To launch it, use the Super + Alt + S key combinaison.

Now navigate to its preferences dialog with Orca + Space key combinaison.

Browse over to the "Voice" tab and choose the "piper" option from the "Speech synthetizer" preference and hit the "Apply" button.

In case Orca is not using the new voice already, you may need to kill it and launch it again. At worse, a computer restart should do.

And — that's all folks!