Any MAC users out there may know that OSX has really great Text to Speach capabilities built into it since OSX Lion (
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/24/os-x-...y-text-to-spe/). Different voices and languages can be downloaded (and the currently active voice selected) in 'System Preferences'.
Once you have downloaded and selected the voice (and language) you want, it is very simple to get your MAC to say something using the 'say' command. Just open a terminal window and type the following;
This can be developed to write a file of the right type and format using the following;
Code: Select all
say -o tada.wav --data-format=LEI16@32000 "Welcome, to Open T X"
Which creates an output file called 'tada.wav' of the right [data] format containing the specified sound . . . from there is is a relatively simple step to build this into a script (or batch file file for those from the WinDoze World) as shown in the example below;
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#!/bin/bash
clear
echo -n "Creating SOUNDS folder in "; pwd
mkdir SOUNDS
cd SOUNDS
echo
echo "Creating EN folder"
mkdir en
cd en
echo "Creating EN sound files"
echo
echo "smart.wav"; say -o smart.wav --data-format=LEI16@32000 "SMART Mode"
echo "agility.wav"; say -o agility.wav --data-format=LEI16@32000 "AGILITY Mode"
echo
echo "Creating SYSTEM folder"
mkdir SYSTEM
cd SYSTEM
echo "Creating SYSTEM sound files"
echo
echo "tada.wav"; say -o tada.wav --data-format=LEI16@32000 "Welcome, to Open T X"
echo
echo "HIT 'CMD+Q' to quit"
echo
This creates the directory structure and the necessary sound files within it. I have used this approach to create a complete set of sound files, which is very easy to add to or modify . . . and it is very very easy to create both male and female voices in English (my preferred language), Scottish, Australian, South African or American (English 2.0) from a plethora of choices (samples are here
http://www.nextup.com/nuance.html) . . . a bit more work for someone (who is a native speaker) to translate the text to French, German, Chinese or whatever (50 voices/languages available including Arabic, three different Chinese dialects, Czech, Danish, two varieties of Dutch, Finnish, two French dialects, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, two Portuguese dialects, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, two Spanish dialects, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish) and then create a local language sound pack on their MAC (but still very straightforward and quick).
Obviously, non of these voices will be patch on individually recorded human voices/phrases . . . but, they are very good and I suspect this is a quicker and more modifiable approach to extend the vocabulary available to us all.
NOTE: having built these commands into a file ('BuildSounds.sh') the file permissions must be changed to executable (CHMOD 777) and the file associated with the 'terminal app' before it can be run.