swiftly

Hi everybody!

I always wanted my ruby apps to tell me when something is wrong. :)

This is inspired by the gem flite4r I found after lunch. After looking around a bit I found www.cepstral.com, which makes some pretty decent unit selection based text to speech stuff.

They have some demo voices, but most of their voices cost around 29$. I couldn’t find any “free” TTS unit selection corpora, so if you know one, text me. :)

Oki, it’s still pretty basic. It essentially just offers one method:

speak “something”

That’s all I need right now, it will be pretty easy to bloat the whole thing with all the stuff cepstrals swift can also do: SSML input, pitch, speed, other voices, etc …

If you want to do that, feel free, fork or text me and I’ll add you to the maintainors.

This is also the first time i’ve written a C extension for ruby (which is easy, so try it), so if know a prettier way to do what Swiftly.c does, text me.

INSTALL:

Before this will work, you’ll need to install a cepstral (5.1) voice and the swift-app and sdk.

It’s pretty easy, just go here: www.cepstral.com/downloads/ download a voice (comes with the swift-app and sdk) and install it.

then go to lib (that’s where my code is) and run: ruby extconf.rb && make

Tada!

I’ll build a gem later or so, lazy…

Example code:

require ‘swiftly’ include Swiftly

class String

def to_speech
   speak self
end

end

“Test. Test.”.to_speech

Have fun!

,nick