Add Bulgarian (bg) language support to Piper TTS integration

[mitre73]

What type of request is this?

Enhancement to existing add-on

Existing add-on name

Piper

Describe the add-on or add-on enhancement

The Bulgarian language model for Piper already exists and is officially available. It does not need to be created from scratch.

Official Model Source: On the official Piper voices page on Hugging Face, there is a complete Bulgarian model ready to use:
https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/tree/main/bg
Specific Model: The exact model is: bg/dimitar (Bulgarian male voice, medium quality, 16-bit).
Adding the bg language code to the integration's language list would allow users to select "Bulgarian" and automatically download the dimitar model (or choose from future Bulgarian voices) through the standard Piper workflow in Home Assistant.

Use cases

Adding the bg language code to the integration's language list would allow users to select "Bulgarian" and automatically download the dimitar model (or choose from future Bulgarian voices) through the standard Piper workflow in Home Assistant.

This small change would make the Home Assistant ecosystem significantly more accessible and user-friendly for the Bulgarian community.

Thank you for your consideration and for all your work on Home Assistant!

Upstream project

No response

Anything else?

No response

[tgechev]

Hi @mitre73, I recently also discovered the Bulgarian voice in Piper. For some reason I also do not see it in the dropdown menu of the Piper app (Apps -> Piper -> Configuration -> Voice). When I checked the Log tab I saw that Piper actually managed to download the voice, however, there is an error log right after:

[15:11:21] INFO: Successfully send discovery information to Home Assistant.
s6-rc: info: service discovery successfully started
s6-rc: info: service legacy-services: starting
s6-rc: info: service legacy-services successfully started
INFO:wyoming_piper.download:Downloaded /data/bg_BG-dimitar-medium.onnx (https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/main/bg/bg_BG/dimitar/medium/bg_BG-dimitar-medium.onnx)
INFO:wyoming_piper.download:Downloaded /data/bg_BG-dimitar-medium.onnx.json (https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/main/bg/bg_BG/dimitar/medium/bg_BG-dimitar-medium.onnx.json)
ERROR:asyncio:Task exception was never retrieved
future: <Task finished name='wyoming event handler' coro=<AsyncEventHandler.run() done, defined at /usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/wyoming/server.py:31> exception=ConnectionResetError('Connection lost')>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/wyoming/server.py", line 41, in run
    if not (await self.handle_event(event)):
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/wyoming_piper/handler.py", line 56, in handle_event
    await self.write_event(self.wyoming_info_event)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/wyoming/server.py", line 29, in write_event
    await async_write_event(event, self.writer)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/wyoming/event.py", line 136, in async_write_event
    await writer.drain()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/asyncio/streams.py", line 378, in drain
    await self._protocol._drain_helper()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/asyncio/streams.py", line 167, in _drain_helper
    raise ConnectionResetError('Connection lost')
ConnectionResetError: Connection lost

I have no idea if the error is related. I tried restarting the Piper App, reloading the Piper Entity in the Wyoming Protocol integration as explained in the Piper docs. I even restarted Home Assistant itself and yet the voice did not pop up in the dropdown.

However, I remembered that the way I use Piper was together with the custom integration ChimeTTS which allows me to manually specify the voice I want to use when executing a chime_tts.say action like so:

After I did this in the Developer Tools and ran a test chime_tts.say action with the voice set to bg_BG-dimitar-medium the generated audio message played just fine on my media player.

Hope this helps!