Speech library for the DEVICE!

[agraham]

After the deafening silence that accompanied my ControlsExDesktop library lets see if this one gets more interest.

I already did a speech library for the desktop Text To Speech library (desktop only) but that was not portable to the device as it used Microsoft's Speech API that is not available on most devices. So I have (almost literally!) sweated blood for a few days to try to get a sound library on the device. After several false starts I have finally managed to port the flite http://fife.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ open source speech engine to the device. It was was a bit of a messy port but it seems to work fine on my device and has the simplest possible interface to B4PPC.

As it was too large to upload directly Erel kindly accepted it by email and has made it available here :-
http://www.basic4ppc.com/files/fliteDevice.zip

[derez]

Amazing, Agraham !

I tried it and it works !

Do you have any means of control like pitch or volume ?

I may find use for it in my off-road navigation program, as instructions to follow a route.

[agraham]

Originally Posted by derez

Do you have any means of control like pitch or volume ?

No unfortunately. The original writers of the software didn't expose any means of controlling the speech engine. I presume such things are characteristic of each "voice", of which there is just one for this library.

[alfcen]

Hello agraham,

Thanks so much for this awesome wrapper!
Fortunately, the engine works for me in the application directory - what a relief

The voice sounds a bit scary, but can be adjusted within limits by playing with the text spelling.
Longer texts, say, in the order of 160 characters, cause a native exception error, though.

[agraham]

Originally Posted by alfcen

Longer texts, say, in the order of 160 characters, cause a native exception error, though.

The limit seems to be 127 characters, a value probably not without significance as it is the maximum value of an unsigned byte. I just missed picking this up as my largest test string was 123 characters long.

I didn't mention it but Say actually returns the number of characters spoken - a hangover from debugging the interface - so you can confirm this limit yourself if you wished.

Because of limitations in the Compact Framework I had trouble marshalling .NET wide strings into C type narrow strings across the DLL call and it is a bit ugly on the native side so I guess that it is related to this. I don't think there is any deeper problem, just an interface problem between the two different sorts of DLL.

I'll look at it to see if it is an easy fix - otherwise you will just have to keep the text shorter than this limit.

[alfcen]

No major problem, agraham, the text could be chunked for longer text conversions while the return value is of great help. Perhaps a 'shut up' (stop)command would be nice to have

[agraham]

Originally Posted by alfcen

Thanks so much for this awesome wrapper!

This was a huge amount of work - not just a wrapper. I had to port the original speech engine C code that was a Unix command line app. to the Visual Studio ARM native C++ compiler and then pack it into a native device DLL and then write the .NET wrapper! The wrapper was the easy bit - it took about 10 minutes - the big native DLL took more than a week of 8+ hour days including false starts!

[agraham]

I'll look at it to see if it is an easy fix

I have fixed it. My classic "C" is a bit rusty - the native ARM C++ compiler thinks that "chars" map to signed bytes - I was assuming unsigned Look out for a link to appear to "fliteDeviceUpdate1". Only the big native fliteDLL.dll is changed.

Originally Posted by alfcen

Perhaps a 'shut up' (stop)command would be nice to have

Sorry, it's not possible because it is running on the B4PPC thread so you don't get control back to stop it until it has stopped anyway!

[alfcen]

Please accept my sincere apologies, agraham. I did not mean to diminish your hard work. I am just not as deep into the matter as you are, thus ignorant about the kind and amount of work involved with DLLs and C programming. I hope you are in the mood for an apology.

I have fixed it.

Sounds great! (I almost completed a chunk routine)

Thanks so much, I will look out for the update link.

I understand about the stop command and will work around it.

Cheers
Robert

[agraham]

Originally Posted by alfcen

I hope you are in the mood for an apology.

No need, I wan't upset at all. I just wanted you to know that behind the scenes some of this stuff can take a lot of time and effort (and background knowledge and sometimes luck) even if it is not obvious from the end result - a single call to a speech engine in this case