Crafting a Bash Script for Text-to-Speech Document Scanning

Understanding the Task

To achieve this, we'll combine two powerful tools:

1. OCR (Optical Character Recognition): This tool will extract text from the scanned document.
2. Text-to-Speech (TTS): This tool will convert the extracted text into spoken audio.

Choosing the Tools

For OCR, we'll use tesseract-ocr. For TTS, we'll utilize festival. Both are widely available and can be installed on most Linux systems.

Writing the Bash Script

Here's a basic Bash script that leverages these tools:

#!/bin/bash
# Ensure Tesseract and Festival are installed
if ! command -v tesseract &> /dev/null; then
  echo "Tesseract-OCR is not installed. Please install it first."
  exit 1
fi

if ! command -v festival &> /dev/null; then
  echo "Festival is not installed. Please install it first."
  exit 1
fi

# Prompt the user for the input file
read -p "Enter the path to the scanned document: " input_file

# Use Tesseract to extract text
output_text=$(tesseract "$input_file" stdout)

# Use Festival to speak the text
festival --tts "$output_text"

How it Works:

1. Checks for Tool Installation: Ensures both Tesseract and Festival are installed.
2. Prompts for Input: Asks the user for the path to the scanned document.
3. Extracts Text: Uses Tesseract to extract text from the document.
4. Speaks the Text: Uses Festival to convert the extracted text into spoken audio.

Additional Considerations:

• Image Format: Tesseract supports a wide range of image formats, including PDF, TIFF, and JPEG.
• Text Cleaning: For better TTS results, consider cleaning the extracted text to remove noise or formatting issues. You might use tools like sed or awk for this.
• Voice Customization: Festival offers various voice customization options. You can adjust pitch, rate, and voice style to suit your preferences.
• Error Handling: Implement error handling to gracefully handle situations like file not found, OCR errors, or TTS failures.
• Batch Processing: For multiple documents, you can use a loop to process each file.
• Advanced Usage: Explore Tesseract's advanced options for improving OCR accuracy, such as language specification, page segmentation, and image preprocessing.

By following these steps and considering the additional points, you can effectively create a Bash script to scan and speak documents.

Remember to install the required packages:

sudo apt install tesseract-ocr libtesseract-dev festival