Real Text-To-Speech For Your Flash Apps

March 2nd, 2010

Text-to-speech has been around for many years, but you know it has never really worked properly. It sounded like a metal can, had issues with different languages, and so on. But I have good news for you.

Acapela created a SaaS (software as a service) offering for Text-To-Speech, which finally sounds pretty cool and I was quite amazed by it — even the Czech language is included This could be a very useful usability feature for your games. You can use it to read a story, chat messages, alerts and so on. I can even imagine this in your enterprise apps as a helper. I presume that having this functionality as a service can really reduce the size of your application (the voice bank must be huge) and CPU load, plus you also have all updates included.

They support ~20 languages in nearly 300 voice variations: Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

Basic sample - more samples

* Built using my evaluation account - it should work till 25th March 2010

Basic code for retrieving voice from a string could look like this:

import com.acapela.vaas.BasicVaas;
import flash.media.*;
import flash.net.*;
 
var myVaas:BasicVaas = new BasicVaas();
 
myVaas.accountLogin = "your_account_login";
myVaas.applicationLogin = "your_application_login";
myVaas.password = "your_application_password";
 
myVaas.generateMessage("heather22k", InputText.text);
 
function messageAvailableEventListener(event:Event)
{
	var channel:SoundChannel = 
		BasicVaas(event.target).requestedSound.play();
}
 
myVaas.addEventListener(BasicVaas.MESSAGE_AVAILABLE, 
			messageAvailableEventListener);

- Acapela is a paid service, check pricing.
- API documentation (AS3).
- Check Acapela.tv

Tags: API, flash, SaaS, text-to-speech, voice
Posted in Flash Media, Tutorial | 15 Comments »