It hurts me to advocate Windows but using tcom with the free speech engine from [Microsoft is almost too easy (yes I know Microsoft and free speech sounds like an oxymoron :)
package require tcom set voice [::tcom::ref createobject Sapi.SpVoice] $voice Speak "Hello World" 1 after 3000 exit
The speech SDK is available from http://www.microsoft.com/speech/download/sdk51/ (51MB), there is a beta of .Net Speech at http://www.microsoft.com/speech/ (200MB) but I haven't tried that yet. - VPT
MG Anyone happen to have a link for more info on this? I've been using it successfully for a couple of weeks in something, but someone just found an error -
$voice Speak "<> test <" 1
returns "0x80045042 {Unknown error}". I did a search on the Microsoft website for the code which, naturally, came up blank. Any ideas would be appreciated :)
GPS Rsynth is a nice public domain package that I've used for speech synthesis. I wrote a say_this.tcl script that built a GUI for tweaking the voice. I've been thinking about improving Rsynth, because it seems to be at the moment dead. Another tool that I've heard good things about was Festival[L1 ]. CMU's Sphinx[L2 ] is another tool that may be good, but I haven't heard from users of it.
See Festtcl for a Tcl interface to Festival.
Tcl'ers may be interested in the CSLU Toolkit [L3 ] developed at the Oregon Graduate Institute's Center for Spoken Language Understanding. It includes a RAD environment which supports Tcl and provides tools to do Speech Recognition as well as speech synthesis. -- aricb
JKM would like to know if MG found any solution to his "0x80045042 {Unknown error}". I'm getting the same error, but it may be for a different reason. By default, the SAPI tries to interpret the string with XML tags if the first character is '<'. Change your 1 to a 17 and you should be alright. I'm getting the same error with
$voice Speak "c:/code/tcl/SAPI2.txt" 5
any help would be appreciated.
MG never did, I'm afraid
MG Having looked on the Microsoft website - for once, it's actually returned something sensible, searching for "sapi.spvoice" on www.microsoft.com - it seems that '5' means "speak a file", the 17 you mentioned before "speak without parsing XML", and 1 is the default. I can replicated the "Unknown Error", using '5', when the file in question doesn't exist. To quote one page of the MS website, the argument must be "a null-terminated, fully qualified path to a file". The page in question is [L4 ], and seems (as of July 10 2005, before they change the address) to be about the first page to start looking at, for this method of speech.