QtSpeech

Qt Speech Module

This page contains notes about the development of a qt speech module. Currently it is about tts (text to speech). Speech recognition may be introduced, but is a lot less trivial at this point in time it seems.

https://codereview.qt.io/#admin,project,qt/qtspeech,info ssh://codereview.qt.io:29418/qt/qtspeech.git

Current State

There is a basic implementation on Mac/Win/Linux/Android. Linux uses speech-dispatcher. Windows uses sapi5. OSX uses Cocoa NSSpeechSynthesizer api.

Todo

Decide on either plugins or only having one backend per platform.

To implement on each platform:

• Windows: availableVoices/setVoice/voice https://codereview.qt-project.org/108169
• Linux: speech-dispatcher connection failure handling https://codereview.qt-project.org/108820
• Android: backend could use a lot of implementation of methods that are empty currently
• iOS: backend needs a bit of thought about how old of iOS should be supported as noted here: https://codereview.qt-project.org/98704

Collection of resources and links that should help defining a cross-platform API:

API for language selection

QLocale seems like a good candidate for languages.

Voice selection

Summarize here which native API offers what. For example SAPI 5 has first names as voice identifiers.

Platform/API	Voice Properties	Link
Win SAPI 5	gender, age, name, lang, vendor - names such as "Microsoft Anna" or "Mike"	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms720151(v=vs.85).aspx#API_for_Text-To-Speech http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms723601(v=vs.85).aspx
Mac Carbon	similar to cocoa api	https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Carbon/Reference/Speech_Synthesis_Manager/Reference/reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000211
Mac Cocoa NSSpeechSynthesizer	id, name, age, gender, language, locale - can be enumerated	https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSSpeechSynthesizer_Class/Reference/Reference.html
Linux SpeechDisp	name, language (2-letter), variant, voice type enum with Male1..3, Female1..3 and childMale, childFemale	http://cvs.freebsoft.org/doc/speechd/speech-dispatcher.html
espeak	lang (two letter [_region-subregion]), age(?), gender, name(=long language name)	espeack —voices
festival	name, gender, maybe more	http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
Android	has a concept of engines, setLanguage locale based, isLanguageAvailable() but no language listing	http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/tts/TextToSpeech.html