I recently faced a challenge while setting up Pico Text-to-Speech (TTS) within a Docker container for my openHAB setup. After some research and troubleshooting, I managed to resolve the issue and thought I’d share my experience to help others who might encounter similar problems.
Initially, I installed Pico TTS on the host machine following the documentation. The installation went smoothly, and I could execute the pico2wave command directly on the host. However, integrating it into the Docker environment proved tricky. I installed the Pico TTS bundle via the openHAB Basic UI and configured the voice settings, but when I tried to use the say() command in a rule, I encountered an error indicating that pico2wave couldn’t be found.
The error message pointed to a missing executable, which made me realize that Pico TTS wasn’t properly accessible within the Docker container. I considered whether installing Pico TTS directly inside the Docker container would solve the problem, but I was concerned about the persistence of the installation after container restarts.
After some digging, I found that the solution involved ensuring that the Docker container could access the Pico TTS binaries on the host machine. I adjusted the Docker configuration to mount the directory containing pico2wave into the container. This way, the container could execute the binary without needing a separate installation inside the container itself.
Once the mounting was correctly configured, I retried the say() command, and it worked perfectly! The voice feedback from Pico TTS was clear and as expected. This experience taught me the importance of proper resource sharing between the host and Docker containers, especially when dealing with system-level binaries.
For anyone else facing similar issues, I recommend checking the Docker container’s access to necessary binaries and ensuring that all required dependencies are correctly mounted or installed within the container environment. Happy automating! 