text to speech conversion

Question

We are making iPhone app where client want reminder as voice message.

Requirement is user will set time and text they want for for reminder.

Using text, I will convert to speech and play the audio file when reminder is triggered.

For this, I planned to use google service

http://www.translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ar&q=%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AD%D8%A8%D8%A7%20%D8%B5%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%82%D8%8C%20%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%81%20%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%9F

http://www.translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=helloE%20friend

Play those text and download the audio file for the same.

NSString* userAgent = @"Mozilla/5.0";

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:[@"http://www.translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=helloE%20friend" 
                                   stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];


NSMutableURLRequest* request = [[[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url] autorelease];

[request setValue:userAgent forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];


NSURLResponse* response = nil;
NSError* error = nil;
NSData* data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request
                                     returningResponse:&response
                                                 error:&error];



[data writeToFile:@"/var/tmp/tts.mp3" atomically:YES];

I can use those code, but client don't want to go online.

Is there any library which can do text-to-speech conversion without internet (like siri is doing)?

Any info on this would be great.

Answer 1

Use AVSpeechSynthesizer

AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer alloc]init];
AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:@"Some random text that you want to be spoken"];
[utterance setRate:0.7];
[synthesizer speakUtterance:utterance];

Reference

Answer 2

This works iOS 7 onwards ONLY

Below is the code I used.

NSString *myStr;

//    myStr = @"Hello friend, how are you?";
myStr = @"مرحبا صديق، كيف حالك؟";

AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer alloc]init];

AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:myStr];
[utterance setRate:0.2f];
//    utterance.voice = [AVSpeechSynthesisVoice voiceWithLanguage:@"en-us"];
utterance.voice = [AVSpeechSynthesisVoice voiceWithLanguage:@"ar-SA"];
[synthesizer speakUtterance:utterance];

Imports used are

#import <AVFoundation/AVFoundation.h>
#import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>

Languages supported are as below.

Arabic (Saudi Arabia) - ar-SA
Chinese (China) - zh-CN
Chinese (Hong Kong SAR China) - zh-HK
Chinese (Taiwan) - zh-TW
Czech (Czech Republic) - cs-CZ
Danish (Denmark) - da-DK
Dutch (Belgium) - nl-BE
Dutch (Netherlands) - nl-NL
English (Australia) - en-AU
English (Ireland) - en-IE
English (South Africa) - en-ZA
English (United Kingdom) - en-GB
English (United States) - en-US
Finnish (Finland) - fi-FI
French (Canada) - fr-CA
French (France) - fr-FR
German (Germany) - de-DE
Greek (Greece) - el-GR
Hindi (India) - hi-IN
Hungarian (Hungary) - hu-HU
Indonesian (Indonesia) - id-ID
Italian (Italy) - it-IT
Japanese (Japan) - ja-JP
Korean (South Korea) - ko-KR
Norwegian (Norway) - no-NO
Polish (Poland) - pl-PL
Portuguese (Brazil) - pt-BR
Portuguese (Portugal) - pt-PT
Romanian (Romania) - ro-RO
Russian (Russia) - ru-RU
Slovak (Slovakia) - sk-SK
Spanish (Mexico) - es-MX
Spanish (Spain) - es-ES
Swedish (Sweden) - sv-SE
Thai (Thailand) - th-TH
Turkish (Turkey) - tr-TR

Reference

Answer 3

Starting from iOS7, Apple already provide that in its SDK as per below:

Apple documentation