LiveCode Forums

In the Dictionary the revSpeak and related items have "mac, windows" listed for the supported operating systems. But text to speech is part of iOS and many of the voices are the same across both Mac OS and iOS. Is text to speech really a desktop OS-only feature in LiveCode?

k

At the moment it is, yes. revSpeak is an old-style external; it has been around for a long time without much love. Now we have the foreign function interface in LiveCode Builder, it would be relatively easy to create an LCB library extension to implement it, and subsume the functionality of revSpeak on desktop.

I figured it was a bit long in the tooth, what with the 'rev' name. Text to speech is a great ability – it's a bit of a jaw-dropper when I demo LiveCode to students, and it's also 'actually' useful. Apple is continually adding voices (current count is over 100) and it's supported well across Mac OS and iOS.

LCB extension creation is beyond me at this point – or to be more precise, I haven't looked at it and I suspect it's beyond me. I hope TTS as a feature isn't something that gets quietly forgotten about! Is there anywhere I can send a plea for some 'speech love' in the LC development plans?

The sunnYtext2speech external has been working very well. There may be some issues right now, but I a hopeful that the developer is working on an update.

That looks very interesting, and the ability to pause and resume could be very handy. However...

• It appears to be iOS-only rather than Mac and iOS (or, better still, Mac/Win/iOS), which would certainly complicate my development experiments.
• It doesn't appear to be currently available to purchase (even the cost isn't given).

You could try speak.js:
http://francoislaberge.com/texttospeech/demo.html
This works in a (hidden) browser widget and thus on Mac/Win/linux in latest LC 8/9.

You don't really know javascript to use it, just a few lines to learn for that, see
https://github.com/kripken/speak.js

Hi All,

Usually Thierry answers quickly.
I saw this message on his site.

Temporary interruption of activity for personal reasons.
Use the contact button for further information.
I'm really sorry about that

@thatkeith
Do you mean sunnytext2speech ?
Yes pause and resume is very useful.
I use it for EcrireEnPictos for iOS which you may find on the App Store for free.

Best regards
Jean-Marc

Hi Ali,
At this time we haven't a simple way to use texttospeech on iOS and i read this:

Now we have the foreign function interface in LiveCode Builder, it would be relatively easy to create an LCB library extension to implement it, and subsume the functionality of revSpeak on desktop.

Some of us have an app using sunnytext2speech (not vailable for xCode 9).
Texttospeech is very important for educational apps
Do you have an idea when it will be available for LiveCode ?
Best regards
Jean-Marc

Hi All,
Good news. iOS texttospeech extension for free.
Have a look here for details
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=33895
All the best
Jean-Marc

I have installed LiveCode-iOS-SpeechSynthetizer-Extension and it should be working in my project. github dot com/SwissEduHack/LiveCode-Extension-iOS-SpeechSynthetizer#readme

However, I cannot get it work. Does anyone know how I could have it simply speak some text in iOS?