I have successfully managed to get System.Speech.Synthesis to read English text in arbitrary voices Anna and Sam. My next task is to localize my application to correctly read Spanish text to our Spanish-speaking clientele.
However, I don't think I am asking the right questions, b/c I cannot find in documentation, forum, group or technology write-up any clear explanation on how this might be done.
1st: Am I correct in saying that there is no setting on the SpeechSynthesizer class or any other Text-To-Speech object? In other words, is it only a matter of installing the correct voice that will read with a Spanish "accent"?
2nd: How does one do this? I have seen links for Spanish libraries that I have tried installing, but I am never able to see these new voices in my Windows XP Speech control panel or in my application's GetInstalledVoices() call.
I am using .Net 3.5 SP 1 one Windows XP SP3, and my code is using Visual Studio 2..8.
If I am missing details, please let me know.
I would appreciate any help.
V
having done this before..
First thing you need to do is get a spanish "Voice Font"..
See http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/
The next thing you need to do is translate your text from english to spanish.
Then you pass your spanish translation into the TTS engine, using the spanish voice font.
Speaker.SelectVoice("<voiceName>");
Related
I'm trying to implement kind of translation application.
I consider using the TTS to "speak" the translated text, but when I tried to get the installed voices I get only 2 (en-US male and female).
I see in the MSDN that:
"Only Microsoft-signed voices installed on the system can be used to generate speech. If no language is specified, the voice that most closely matches the language selected by the user in the Language control panel is loaded."
So my question is: how can I get additional voices besides those who already installed in the device?
Thanks in advance,
As suggested by the MSDN article you quoted, the user can add voices by installing appropriate languages in the control panel. Apps will then have access to these voices.
Apps cannot add voices or use voices beyond what are installed on the device.
OS X Lion comes with some fantastic voices from Nuance. I would like to use them from my software, however, currently they require the user to manually go to System Preferences, Dictation and Speech, System Voice -> Customize, then download the voices from Apple. I would like to call something from Objective-C so that that voices that are missing (say Chinese voices) are automatically downloaded in the background. How can this be done?
Incidentally, the available voices on the system can be found using
[NSSpeechSynthesizer availableVoices]
but all the possible voices (so far) can only be found in the Dictation and Speech dialog. Here is how it is done manually:
I highly doubt there is any reliable way to do this.
You should just point the user to a help page explaining the process (preferably a help page on apple's website if possible, since they'll keep it updated if the process changes).
You're going to need root access to do it, which is banned from App Store apps. And it almost certainly needs to tie into the software update process which is extremely complex, completely undocumented, and subject to change at any time.
Alternatively, contact nuance for a license to distribute the voices yourself. They are all for sale. Maybe you can even get a discounted price if you only install if on macs where the user can get them for free.
You can use this AppleScript to programmatically install TTS Voice, but MacOS is coming with all voices!
But Not all are showed in "Dictation & Speech->System Voice".
The reason is that they are very simple(compact) version and MacOS show only the full version of instaled Voice(s) like:"Alex".
Examples:
My Configuration:
You can see that I have only english voices but the next example work perfectly with spanish text.
Swift example:
var voice:NSSpeechSynthesizer = NSSpeechSynthesizer(voice: "com.apple.speech.synthesis.voice.diego")
voice.startSpeakingString("España y los españoles")
Terminal example:
say -v monica "En España a los españoles les encanta paella"
How to get the download list is a mystery... yet...
Using wireshark, it is possible to determine the voice location. Indeed a pkg is downloaded from Apple. Whether credentials, etc. are needed, is a separate issue.
Here are additional sample URLs:
/content/downloads/10/29/041-5265/kKRs5z32DcbrGdV4TZvY9hcqy8tcpkbX43/MLV_en_AU_karen.pkg
After download, could then run installer to install.
Update. I was able to download the pkg from Windows using http. Also, this other link
http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/59/49/041-4469/WNshMBxxbxx5qXv27Mrvxm7yKcSRM75sVw/041-4469.English.dist
gives information about 041-4469 including the package name.
i currently have a tts which is built using festival and festvox. i need to convert these voices and build a TTS in flite. apparently you can do the conversion using festvox (the festvox and flite websites say so but no proper steps on how to do it). can some one please help me out with it as i am new to this area?
thanx in advance ..
Just in-case anyone else was wondering the same i found the steps mentioned in this document useful and also subscribe to the mailing lists and feel free to ask question.
although i must mention i never implemented to TTS using "flite". i went ahead with "espeak"
my uncle challenged me to make an application in which you can search the file system of a Mac. I've never actually had to do this yet in my programming experience, but I think it would be good to know as well. I have a search field, and a button that says search. Does anybody know how I can make that search the file system, and display the results? Thanks in advance!
this should help: http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/07/12/spotlight.html?page=1
I would like to build an application that reads french text. I have already developed the app and it is able to read the text in English. I only need how to pass a parameter to the speech API so that it would speak in French.
Thanks in advance
Did you check this ? http://www.mperfect.net/speechSamples/
You need a French voice. Unfortunately, there aren't any free French voices available for SAPI 5 (and therefore usable with the .NET framework).
What programming language are you using?