Multilingual Text to Speech Libraries?

Question

Hi all,

I'm currently looking at developing a small client that has the ability to read text to speech in a variety of languages. Mainly targeting English & Japanese.

So my question is, does anyone know of a library that is capable of reading English and Japanese to speech?

My target development language initially, is c#

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

The Speech APIs built into Windows XP/Vista support Text to Speech in English, Japanese, and many more languages.

Check out this link for a tutorial:

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Microsoft Speech API, if you have the right voices (you can buy them, free voices are often of poor quality. Windows ships by default with an English voice).

You can find some free SAPI voices here.

You can listen to Loquendo TTS to hear the voices quality.

TTS is really easy with SAPI (when set, it's a one liner).

There's a .NET port :

The .NET 3.0 Framework has included a managed speech API, System.Speech. This allows you to rapidly create speech-enabled Windows applications for Windows Vista using Visual Studio 2005. As with all versions of SAPI, this version is dependent on the operating system. SAPI 5.3 is only available on Windows Vista. As with previous versions of SAPI, your application can run on earlier versions, such as Windows XP's SAPI 5.1, however, if your application uses any features specific to SAPI 5.3, expect a not-supported error.

The two main namespaces to become familiar with for .NET speech-enabled applications are System.Speech.Synthesis and System.Speech.Recognition

http://reddevnews.com/articles/2007/02/15/give-applications-a-voice.aspx

Answer 3

If you don't mind calling a web service you could use the speech synthesis from the Microsoft translator API here. This blog post has an C# Silverlight example using the translator and TTS features.