Text To Speech by Java - Simplified

Sun released a standard cross platform Speech APIs for Text to Speech and Speech recognition.
With the Java Speech API you can incorporate speech technology into user interfaces for your applets and applications based on Java technology. This API specifies a cross-platform interface to support command and control recognizers, dictation systems and speech synthesizers.
Cross-Industry Development
The Java Speech API was developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. in collaboration with leading speech technology companies: Apple Computer, Inc., AT&T, Dragon Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Novell, Inc., Philips Speech Processing, and Texas Instruments Incorporated. Sun works with third-party speech companies to encourage the availability of multiple implementations.

One of these implementations is FreeTTS.



In this post we will go through few steps and simplest way to use the text to speech functionality..

1. Download FreeTTS library:


Download version 1.2

2. Create new Java project:

Add to the class path of this project the following jars : freetts.jar & jsapi.jar

3. Create a new class:

Add the following logic:


1) Declare instance variable:

Voice speechVoice = null;


2) Initialize the voice manager :

VoiceManager voiceManager = VoiceManager.getInstance();
speechVoice = voiceManager.getVoice("kevin16");
speechVoice.allocate();

3) User the voice :

speechVoice.speak("Osama Oransa Java Architect from Egypt");
speechVoice.speak("Judy where are you?");

4) Deallocate it when you don't want it or want to exist from the program:

speechVoice.deallocate();


5) There are 3 possible values for the voice:

Alan , kevin and kevin16

* a low quality, unlimited domain, 8kHz diphone voice, called kevin
* a medium quality, unlimited domain, 16kHz diphone voice, called kevin16
* a high quality, limited domain, 16kHz cluster unit voice, called alan

To list all available voices:
Voice voices[] = voiceManager.getVoices();
for(int i = 0; i < voices.length; i++){
System.out.println(" " + voices[i].getName() + " (" + voices[i].getDomain() + " domain)");
}

** To control voice properties:
Like volume , pitch ,...etc.. call corresponding methods on Voice instance:

speechVoice.setVolume(2);
speechVoice.setPitch(100);
speechVoice.setRate(20) ;

The initial values for those parameters are 1.0 (volume at its loudest level), 100.0 (frequency of the voice) 150.0 (rate of words per minute).

This is the simplest way to use this APIs but there is another way you can check at the documentation to create Synthesizer

If you don't care about the voice characteristics:

Synthesizer synth = Central.createSynthesizer(null);

If you do care initialize it as:

SynthesizerModeDesc required = new SynthesizerModeDesc ();
required.setLocale (new Locale ("es", null));
required.addVoice (new Voice (null,GENDER_FEMALE,AGE_DONT_CARE,null));
Synthesizer synth = Central.createSynthesizer(required);

synth.allocate ();
synth.resume (); // to wait text to speech


To use it:
synth.speakPlainText(text.getText (), null);
try{
// Block this thread until
// the synthesizer's queue
// is empty.
synth.waitEngineState(Synthesizer.QUEUE_EMPTY);
}catch (InterruptedException e2){
}

To deallocate it:
synth.deallocate();

These need you to do the following as well:

-Copy speech.properties to Java Home %java.home%\lib

-Add voices.txt to classpath and put in mind that 1st line of voice will be used

*voices are stored in .jar files:

- cmu_time_awb.jar stores the Alan voice directory for clock-specific speech.
- cmu_us_kal.jar stores the Kevin voice directory for generic speech.