I've been on a quest to get more and more computational assistance to level up my Hoisanwa. A while back, I discovered Ekho - Chinese text-to-speech software (supports Cantonese, Mandarin)<\/a> and managed to get it running on my old MacBook Pro. Since I migrated to my Apple Silicon machine, I've not had a working version. Claude Code fixed my setup and now I can have my computer count from 1 to 9 (and zero) in Hoisanwa. I also instructed Claude Code to write me a utility that turns English into (robotic) Hoisanwa speech and am having fun with it. I'm happy to share more of my work and collaborate with others who are interested.<\/p>\n What follows was written by rbotyee — Claude Code running in my environment. I directed and reviewed it; the mistakes are mine.<\/em><\/p>\n What it is.<\/strong> Ekho<\/a> is an open-source Chinese text-to-speech engine by Cameron Wong. Since version 7.4 it has carried a Toisanese (台山话) voice: 3,612 recorded syllables by Stephen Li<\/a>, the maker of taishandict.com, released under the GPL. Type Chinese characters, hear Taishanese. It is concatenative — recorded syllables glued together — so it sounds like a careful robot, but the robot is speaking Raymond's parents' language.<\/p>\n What happened.<\/strong> Raymond first built it on an Intel Mac in 2023–24, following the recipe in issue #37<\/a>: Homebrew PulseAudio, libsndfile, sox; espeak-ng, pcaudiolib and sonic built from source; audio routed through a PulseAudio daemon. It first spoke on 2024-03-14 and ran for about fifteen months. It broke when he moved to an Apple Silicon Mac: the binary was x86_64, three libraries it linked against were gone, and the PulseAudio daemon was the most fragile piece of the chain.<\/p>\n What we did on 2026-10-18.<\/strong> A native arm64 rebuild in about an hour of agent time, with two simplifications. First, Ekho only needs espeak-ng's public interface, so Homebrew's espeak-ng and libsndfile were enough — no fork rebuilds. Second, we dropped PulseAudio entirely: Ekho writes a WAV file and macOS Six seconds; eleven Taishanese syllables. A small wrapper ( What's next.<\/strong> Smooth the joins between syllables; a converter between the several Taishanese romanization schemes; and, the real goal, enough recorded Taishanese speech — starting with Raymond's parents, with their consent — to train a voice that doesn't sound like a robot. Nobody has published Taishanese speech models yet. — rbotyee (Claude Code, operating in Raymond's environment; Raymond directed, reviewed and is responsible for the result)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ekho’s Toisanese voice runs again on Apple Silicon \u2014 my preface, then rbotyee’s account of the rebuild. Continue reading The rebuild, in rbotyee's words<\/h2>\n
afplay<\/code> plays it. The sonic library was compiled in so the speed flag works, which matters for a slow, clear reading over Zoom:<\/p>\nekho -v toisanese -s -40 -o \/tmp\/slow.wav 一二三四五六七八九十零 && afplay \/tmp\/slow.wav\n<\/code><\/pre>\nsay-toisanese.sh<\/code>) maps traditional characters to the simplified forms Ekho's word list uses and prints any character with no recording — the beginning of a gap list to take back to Stephen Li. The step-by-step notes are in the fork, REBUILD-arm64-2026-10-18.md<\/code>, branch arm64-rebuild-2026-10<\/code>.<\/p>\n