Mozilla TTS Installation PEP 517 Error

Error and possible solutions

Had trouble installing Mozilla TTS (Text to Speech) with the command

pip install TTS

on Ubuntu 20.4, getting error

Could not build wheels for pyworld which use PEP 517 and cannot be installed directly 

which is apparently a rather generic error pointing to missing upstream dependencies. Some suggested solutions didn't work, so I removed (probably not necessary) and re-instaled pip, but also installed build tools and python3-dev:

sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev pip

Then I approached like suggested here:

pip3 install --upgrade pip # get PIP 21

and added the folder containing pip, which in Ubuntu is usually ~/.local/bin to the PATH:

export PATH=/home/itsme/.local/bin:$PATH

as was suggested on the shell.

I could then run

pip3 install TTS

without error. Not sure what measure or step fixed it, but maybe this post can give some pointers. I guess it was the missing build tools.

Hope it helps.

Posted: 26 October 2021