Adds a fourth TTS engine alongside Piper / Kokoro / biblical-tts: a
small FastAPI bridge to Microsoft Edge's Read Aloud TTS via the
edge-tts Python package. Provides studio-quality Modern Hebrew (he-IL)
and Modern Greek (el-GR) narrators for the cluster.
modern-tts/Dockerfile + app.py:
- Python 3.12 base + edge-tts==7.2.8 (older versions hit 403 from MS).
- POST /tts -> MP3 audio (audio/mpeg).
- POST /timings -> word-level timings. Edge sometimes omits WordBoundary
events for non-English voices; fall back to MP3-frame-walking duration
estimate + proportional distribution across whitespace-split words
(same approach biblical-tts uses for eSpeak).
- GET /voices?language=all|default — filtered to he-/el- by default so
the AiStation voice picker isn't overwhelmed by 400+ voices.
- GET /health for probes.
- Body shape mirrors BiblicalTtsRequest so the .NET client lives in the
same FlowerCore.Shared.Speech package.
K8s deployment in fc-ttsreader namespace:
- ttsreader-modern Deployment + Service on port 10403.
- localhost/fc-modern-tts:v1, imagePullPolicy: Never (built on noc1,
imported to all 3 RKE2 nodes via ctr).
- runAsNonRoot uid 1654 + fsGroup 1654.
- dnsPolicy: None to bypass the *.iamworkin.lan template hijack on
Microsoft endpoint lookups.
- Modest resources (100m/128Mi req, 1000m/512Mi limit) — edge-tts is
network-bound, not compute-bound.
- Probes against /health.
Verified live locally: container handles 'Καλημέρα Ελλάδα Πώς είστε'
in 2496ms, returns el-GR-NestorasNeural voice + 4 word timings.
Hebrew: 'בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים' returns he-IL-AvriNeural,
2472ms, 3 words.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
