Text to speech on iPhone

Question

Hi

Is there any way we can convert text to speech in an iPhone app? Is it possible using the SDK?

Thanks

Are there any third-party TTS engines available for the iPhone? (AFAIK Acapela is not yet released)

Answer 1

I don't think iPhone SDK provides any TTS facility internally. You should use a third party TTS engine or write one yourself.

Answer 2

The Flite speech synthesis engine can be run on an iPhone, ref http://artofsystems.blogspot.com/2009/02/speech-synthesis-on-iphone-with-flite.html

Answer 3

I downloaded Tomsoft app on the iPhone before buying the engine but found app to be very slow in the converting the text before it can play. Not sure if this is the app implementation or the engine itself. Looks like the app writes to the file first and then play the speech back but hope there is in memory play option in the engine that may provide better performance. I have sent an email to the support and will let you all know what I hear back or find.

Answer 4

Is there any 3rd party commercial engine available for iPhone other than Tomsoft?

Answer 5

Hi guys. The Tomsoft engine is only slow with the custom voices. I'm not sure why. But if you remove the other voices and just the integrated basic KAL voice it will speak almost instanteously. Please send me an email using the contact form on my website if you need any help with this.

Answer 6

http://www.acapela-group.com/acapela-for-iphone-26-speech-solutions.html

Get ready to pay out the butt

Answer 7

I have been looking into this too. With no luck.

For a desktop app you can access the internal tts on the Mac http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Carbon/Reference/Speech%5FSynthesis%5FManager/Reference/reference.html

Not sure if the SDK offers this.

The phone does have a TTS as all 3GS phones and 16gb Touches have VoiceOver included.

Let me know if you figure this out. I also want to use the TTS in the phone for a project .

If you figure it out you can reach me at [email protected]

Mostly I just need to know if it is possible.

Mark

Answer 8

What if I just need to speak numbers (or dates and times)?

Has anyone seen any iphone source-code for that?

(I assume I would start with a bunch of individual sound files, each containing 1 number.)

Answer 9

Hi Friends,

Is there any way, by which we can convert speech to Text using iPhone SDK?

Thanks, Krishnan.

Answer 10

For speech to text, look up PocketSphinx. Its a C-based Library, and it has been used on iPhone apps before.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/942312/iphone-app-add-voice-recognition

Answer 11

Neospeech, Inc. has a really good TTS engine for iPhone.

Answer 12

http://github.com/KingOfBrian/VocalKit

I wrote a wrapper around pocket sphinx and flite, you should be able to check it out pretty quickly.

Answer 13

I'm probably bumping a dead thread but this engine

worked wonders for me!

Hope it helps!

Answer 14

That's pretty nuts- I mean - voiceover has great TTS, and it's on the iPhone- so it's a real shame you can't use it...