Text to Speech

[ShawnDriscoll]

I have an old Microsoft Text-To-Speech API that I use (have been using on and off for 15 years now). It hasn't been updated in years. The female voice has no name (that's how old it is). She works still with my Python scripts. Microsoft doesn't support the SDK anymore, and Windows 10 allows me to run it still. At some point, this voice (and the voice recognition I use also) will be broken in Windows 11.

I think Windows XP or 7 (maybe Vista) had a few more voices to play with, if you bought those voices. Nearly all of my updated Traveller apps have speech in them now. But it's the old voice still. I will say though, she can read pretty much anything I send her way, without me telling her how it should sound. The word "Psion" is a problem for her.

Anyone here dabbling with TTS in Windows 10 using something newer? That has an API of a sort for various languages? I haven't looked into Cortana yet to see what Python stuff there may be for her.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

For now, I've "standardized" my apps on the pyttsx module. I think it's version 1.1 that I'm using. I have US Zira and US Mike and some UK voices taking on my computer now through Python. The voices don't lock the apps while they are speaking in them. So that's good.

 

[coliver988]

I messed with the voice API a few years back, on on Win8 there were actually about 6 voices - 4 female, 2 male, with various accents (there was French, Russian if I recall). They all worked for reading just fine. Windows 10 did depreciate them but you can probably still find the libraries out there. I'll have to dig that up - all I remember was that it was so simple to make it read things.

There are a few voice recognition things available as MS, Google & Amazon are all about opening things up to get the user base. I don't know about Apple/Siri as, while I actually develop on a Mac for work it is Filemaker (which is questionable ti consider as development). However my past job we used DragonSpeech on the iPad and it was simply amazing (the medical version, and we ended up being the largest user for that product so had some say over things. It was amazing to hear it pick up the medical jargon).

Hmm - wonder if I can add that to my very slowly moving UWP ship tracker? Be nice to have it talk: You are currently in orbit at Allel.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Spoken messages are much better than just simple dings when Traveller app events are triggered.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Just updated my die roller from Python 2.5 to Python 3.9 last night. Source is at GitHub https://github.com/ShawnDriscoll/PyTravCalc

It's using pre-recorded voices instead of TTS voices.