Text-To-Speech/Mac OS X

[Dar Scott]

On Sunday, April 14, 2002, at 02:17 AM, Kurt Kaufman wrote:

> on mouseUp
>  put "The text I want spoken." into myVar
>  Do "say " &quote& myVar &quote& " using " &quote& Princess &quote 
> as Applescript
> end mouseUp
>
This is fun!  And can be handy for a mock-up before recording is made.

AND you can use English phonemic and "prosodic" symbols.

Just "say" things like this:

[[inpt PHON]]
DUH kAEt IHn ~DUH hAEt
[[inpt TEXT]]

The table I found to do this is here:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/Sound/Sound-201.html

See also,
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/Sound/Sound-200.html

It is missing the er vowel (as in bird) which is needed for most 
dialects of American English.  You can approximate it with 
"<<<IX>>r".  It also doesn't have syllabic l, m and n.  I used 
">l", ">>>m", and ">>n" for those below, but they may not work in 
other contexts.  The last is often after a glottal stop and I 
used "<<%" for that.  Some speakers in New England make a 
distinction between the first vowel in father and the vowel in cot, 
so I fiddled with the vowel there, but I doubt whether such 
speakers would agree with me.

Here is what I got:

The [[inpt PHON]]f>AAD<<<IX>>r b<<<IX>>rd
[[inpt TEXT]] chased after the [[inpt PHON]] lIHd>l kIH<<%>>n
%%lIHs>>n tUW DUH >>rIHD>>>m [[inpt TEXT]]

I wasn't able to make it say "Loch Ness".

And you can sometimes roughly approximate foreign language:

[[inpt PHON]]
mOWSIYmOWSIY% dOWn<<AAt<<AA dEHs k<<<AA
[[inpt TEXT]]

Hmmm.  I have the SIL IPA fonts on my machine...

Dar Scott