Usage

Installing PyLips

Note

We have identified an error installing PyLips on python 3.12 on Mac OS. The current workaround is to downgrade to python 3.11. We are working on a fix for this issue.

You can install PyLips using pip. To install PyLips, run this command in your terminal:

$ python3 -m pip install pylips

If you are running PyLips on a Linux Distribution, you may need to also install the following packages:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install espeak-ng ffmpeg libespeak1

PyLips Quickstart

Here is a quick example to test your installation. This code will make your computer face say “Hello, welcome to pylips”. The voice will be the default system voice, but this is something we can change later.

First, we will have to start the PyLips server. This is a simple flask server that can serve several faces at the same time. To start the server, run the following command:

$ python3 -m pylips.face.start

This will start the server on port 8000. Do not worry about the warning message, the package will still work. You can connect any web browser to the urls printed, even across computers on the local network. For now, just open a browser and go to http://localhost:8000/face to see the face.

Note

When you first load up the face, you will see a popup that asks you to interact with the webpage. Interacting with the webpage is required by many browsers to allow audio to be played through the webpage. If your setup does not require webpage audio, you can turn off the audio unlock overlay by passing the --skip-audio-unlock flag when running pylips.face.start.

Now open a new terminal tab and run the following code:

from pylips.speech import RobotFace

face = RobotFace()
# you may need to wait here for a minute or two to let allosaurus download on the first run

face.say("Hello, welcome to pylips!")

If all goes well, the face should have said the message!

Note

PyLips generates a folder in the directory you run it called pylips_phrases. This folder is used to store the generated sound files. You may delete this folder at any time, but it will be re-created when needed.

Tell us how this process went by filling out this survey! We are looking to improve the installation process for PyLips!

More Features of PyLips

Follow these other guides to learn more about PyLips: