TTS-API on HackerShow

text-to-speech api

SHOW HN2012

Text-to-speech API

Shown by typeofNaN on Nov 11, 2012. Click the card to turn it over.

111points

48comments

#187of 1,677 in 2012

Top 12%of 2012 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

9 positive, 14 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 8 critical, out of 32 comments about the project. Thread score +0.09.

Idea: 5 for, 3 againstPerformance: 1 for, 5 againstExecution: 3 for, 0 against

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

Simple and easy to use API
From 3 comments
- Excellent and dead easy to use. Great work on making it simple. I was actually looking for a similar API like this just a few hours ago, but with some other languages as well.…
  snoonan on HN
- Great, simply great API that just works. Keep up the good work! What I would love to see now would be the ability to send compressed text to shorten the url.
  babebridou on HN
- Very smooth and simple as it should be. Are you going to implement other languages ?
  morgangiraud on HN
Handles technical terms well
From 1 comment
- Pretty impressive, I've given it a go with a few of the more technical terms that I come across at work and that other TTS' have difficulty handling and it dictated them…
  alexmunroe on HN

Licensing of Apple's system voices may forbid this commercial use
From 4 comments
- Quite cool... But if this is generated by the text to speech engine from OS X, then I am afraid it is going beyond the license that come up with OS X. I remember reading through…
  yoda_sl on HN
- Careful, though. This is expressly against the license agreement for Mac OS X.
  snoonan on HN
- In case anyone else is curious, the section you're thinking of is ""F. Voices. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the system voices included in the…
  mherdeg on HN
- Well, not really; the quality is nothing like as good. It's a nifty trick being able to do synthesis at all in Javascript, though. And, of course, it presumably doesn't have the…
  archangel_one on HN
Non-English text such as Russian does not work
From 1 comment
- Russian does not work: http://tts-api.com/tts.mp3?q=%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82
  abava on HN
Voice quality and prosody are unnatural
From 2 comments
- This is a nice one, however I'm still confounded by the lack of progress since bell labs made an online text to speech converter many years ago. Particularly, the notion that the…
  lefthansolo on HN
- Neat, once again, emscripten proves useful. I do find it important though to point out the lack of a good open text-to-speech engine. Here is a speech as rendered by tts-api.com…
  ninjin on HN

Open source the code on GitHub
From 3 comments
- Is this piping to the Mac OS X "say" CLI command? Neat. I'd love to see the source behind this, if you felt like putting it on Github.
  jeffehobbs on HN
- Would be great if you could share your code on Github
  leoplct on HN
- Great job! Something that was really needed. I would love to see this open sourced :)
  yati on HN
Support more output formats such as Vorbis or Opus
From 1 comment
- Very nice. Would be good to have the option of other formats, specifically Vorbis and/or Opus.
  KwanEsq on HN
Add a speech-to-text API
From 2 comments
- Awesome! Will you release a speech-to-text API as well, or know of a good one? Thanks!
  savrajsingh on HN
- What about a speech-to-text API?
  davecap1 on HN
Support SSML or IPA phoneme input
From 1 comment
- Does it support IPA or SSML[1]? I ask because AT&T's TTS API[2] does, but it kind of sucks! For example, ``` <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="/ˈkreɪp/"></phoneme> ``` [1]…
  tantalor on HN

Where do the voices come from and how are they licensed?
From 2 comments
- Where are the voices from, and how are they licensed? Could I use the output from this for commercial purposes?
  dholowiski on HN
- Quite cool... But if this is generated by the text to speech engine from OS X, then I am afraid it is going beyond the license that come up with OS X. I remember reading through…
  yoda_sl on HN
Can commercial use of the output be allowed?
From 1 comment
- Where are the voices from, and how are they licensed? Could I use the output from this for commercial purposes?
  dholowiski on HN

espeak and SVOX Pico open-source TTS engines
From 3 comments
- If you use Ubuntu or similar there is also eSpeak espeak -w output.wav 'I love jiggy'
  jiggy2011 on HN
- The open-source, cross-platform equivalent of `say` is a piece of software called "SVOX Pico". There is also a Python-based wrapper for it called picospeaker. Relevant AUR link…
  Toshio on HN
- http://syntensity.com/static/espeak.html If you're looking for a client side solution, here's espeak compiled to JS using emscripten.
  po84 on HN
Google translate_tts unofficial endpoint
From 1 comment
- There's an unofficial Google API that does the same job people may be interested in: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello+World
  bencevans on HN
Bing speech API
From 1 comment
- Bing's got an API -- you need to sign up for a key but you get a very large number of free uses and I dont think there's a char limit.
  kajecounterhack on HN
AT&T TTS API
From 1 comment
- Does it support IPA or SSML[1]? I ask because AT&T's TTS API[2] does, but it kind of sucks! For example, ``` <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="/ˈkreɪp/"></phoneme> ``` [1]…
  tantalor on HN