@ikidd@lemmy.world pointed me to piperTTS and i ended up with a python virtual enviroment, pip install piper-tts and de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx+json to be able to run echo "{{ $json.state}}" | piper -m ./de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx -f voice.wav && aplay voice.wav

and indeed that sounds much better than pico and espeak

thanks

my use case is that n8n sshs into a remote machine with low specs and a connected speaker to read out information sent from n8n so i can do stuff like: pico2wave -l de-DE -w /tmp/warn.wav "Es ist {{ $json.Hour }} Uhr." && aplay /tmp/warn.wav And as you might have guess by now german language would be appreciated. I’m not going to run any additional docker containers for voice generation or invoke remote services. also the speaker is as dirt cheap as the rest of the setup so any output from espeak was basically killing my eardrums.