When the default text-to-speech program (spd-say) speaks it is accompanied by noise/crackling/buzzing (and some echo), how to fix?

spd-say "Hello world!"

I'm running Ubuntu 17.10 on a laptop (Dell XPS 15). I haven't noticed any audio problems on this machine with any other application. I've done sudo apt dist-upgrade pretty recently so everything is pretty much up to date.

> lspci | grep Audio
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
> spd-say --version
spd-say: 0.8.7
Copyright (C) 2002-2012 Brailcom, o.p.s.
> uname -sr
Linux 4.13.0-39-generic

The problem persists if I change the volume on the computer, but if I run the application randomly a couple of times with the parameters -i -50 (decreased volume) it goes away temporarily, but I am looking for a more permanent solution.

1 Answer

It seems to be a bug in the combination of speech-dispatcher with pulseaudio. As a workaround you can set

AudioOutputMethod "libao"

in /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf.

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