

Speak.js Demo - katsuyan
http://speak-demo.herokuapp.com/

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chewxy
Doesn't work on Firefox 13.01 on Ubuntu Precise. Works on Chromium 18.05.

Fun one: Speed - 115, Amplitude - 50, Pitch - 200, Text - "Never give up,
never surrender"

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azakai
Works on Firefox 16 on Ubuntu.

Do you get an error in the web console (control-shift-k)?

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jaredsohn
For those curious (I didn't know myself until researching some ideas for this
API), Chrome has a built-in text-to-speech API
(<http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tts.html>) for use in extensions
and packaged web apps.

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jfoster
Note that the Chrome one is limited to Chrome browser extensions and packaged
apps. For one reason or another it doesn't extend to hosted Chrome apps.

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stevejohnson
Doesn't work with Flashblock enabled, which seems odd to me.

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adrinavarro
Works here for me with flash disabled in chrome settings. The code is an
embedded audio with inline base64 data.

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josephcooney
I wish I had something more constructive to say than 'wow, this is really
cool' but, wow, this is really cool. I was saddened to see speech synthesis
and speech generation (seemingly) punted from the Win8 WinRT APIs. And here
you are doing it with a bit of Javascript.

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chime
iOS doesn't offer much in the realm of TTS either. Siri has such a good voice
but there is no API to make your iPhone or iPad talk from your own app.

OpenEars has made a decent TTS engine (based on flite) but it is far from the
top of the line engines offered by Acapela, Ivona, and NeoSpeech.

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daemon13
Not working - Ubuntu Lucid, Firefox 13.0.1., no speakers - headphones.

Otherwise - excellent hack, can have many uses - marketing, e-commerce, people
with disabilities, you name it.

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jaredsohn
Discussion of the same project from almost a year ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828626>

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spenvo
I will be adding this to my accessibility toolbox -- thanks for sharing this!
A bit of a tangent -- does anyone have experience making their (single-page)
web apps accessible (especially in the context of W3's "Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0"): <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/>)? If so,
could you share a starting point/good-resource on troubleshooting some of the
issues that arise?

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unimpressive
Not working in Ubuntu 11.10, Firefox 13.

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syassami
Works on Chrome - osx lion, you have to wait a good 15 seconds before sound
starts though

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cabalamat
Why does it pronounce Caligula as Caligul? And is it possible to input IPA
into it?

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chrischen
It seems to ignore the -a in "sucka" too. Must be something with trailing As.

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tiglionabbit
It seems to be missing 'ly' as well.

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lexy0202
Wow... [http://speak-
demo.herokuapp.com/javascripts/speakGenerator.j...](http://speak-
demo.herokuapp.com/javascripts/speakGenerator.js)

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BaconJuice
can someone explain to me what is going on in there? How are the words
generated with this file?

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radarsat1
Hm, I guess that is compiled from <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/> so the
source might be a better starting point.

<http://espeak.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/espeak/trunk/>

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franze
hiho

somethings in the air ... i coded a little project (also based on kripkens
awesome speak.js) a month or so ago (in a little cabana in bolivia while i was
travelling) <http://lalo.li> 100% client side, shareable text2speech voice
messages

after some data crunching so far: people dont use it for anything useful, most
traffic via facebook shares (of funny messages)

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dharma1
this is great!! Was looking for client side TTS for a rhyming hack a couple of
weeks ago. Ended up piggybacking on Google's translator instead, which is
great quality but is of course server side.
<http://helmicreative.com/lab/audio/rhyme.html>

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john2x
Not playing on Safari, Mac OS X 10.7.4

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martincerdeira
It does not work on firefox 13.0.1

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gojomo
Sounds a lot like the old Talking Moose/Macintalk voice (1986):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose>

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PsyGeek
Doesn't work with Firefox in Arch Linux using kernel 3.3.7 -- odd.

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RandallBrown
How does this work? Does it use the audio tag and a data URI?

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chewxy
The source is here[1]. It does use an audio tag in speakClient.js

Read through speakGenerator to see how the data is generated I guess

1\. <https://github.com/katsuyan/speak.js>

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quizbiz
Not friendly with Dolphin Browser on Android.

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badragon
GPL V3 so I would not take a chance with it.

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azakai
If there is another speech generator with permissive licensing we can compile
that one too.

