This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Sam Dalton. Original Post: Java speaks back Feed Title: import java.*; Feed URL: http://www.samjdalton.com/pebble/rss.xml Feed Description: Random, Infrequent Bloggings of a Techie Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Sam Dalton Latest Posts From import java.*;

While perusing my friend Gerard's blog today I noticed he has been playing around with FreeTTS which is a speech synthesis system written entirely in Java.

FreeTTS provides some support for the Java Speech API v1.0 (JSAPI).

One day I will find a good use for this (when I ever have an assignment that allows me to write client side code!), but for now, I put together a small demo. All this does is speaks back anything that you type. You too can have endless (almost!) fun findong out how it pronounces various swear words (I am such a child somethimes ;)) Anyhow, the code is as follows:

package com.samjdalton.speakie;

import com.sun.speech.freetts.jsapi.FreeTTSEngineCentral;

import javax.speech.EngineCreate;
import javax.speech.EngineList;
import javax.speech.synthesis.Synthesizer;
import javax.speech.synthesis.SynthesizerModeDesc;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.Locale;


public class JavaSpeak implements Runnable {
    private Synthesizer synthesizer;

    public JavaSpeak() {
        initialise();
    }


    private void initialise() {
        try {
            SynthesizerModeDesc desc =
                    new SynthesizerModeDesc(null,
                            "general",
                            Locale.US,
                            Boolean.FALSE,
                            null);

            FreeTTSEngineCentral central = new FreeTTSEngineCentral();
            EngineList list = central.createEngineList(desc);

            if (list.size() > 0) {
                EngineCreate creator = (EngineCreate) list.get(0);
                this.synthesizer = (Synthesizer) creator.createEngine();

            }
            if (this.synthesizer == null) {
                System.exit(1);
            }
            this.synthesizer.allocate();
            this.synthesizer.resume();

        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }


    public void run() {
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

        try {
            String line = reader.readLine();
            while (!line.equals("")) {
                synthesizer.speakPlainText(line, null);
                line = reader.readLine();
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            System.exit(1);
        }
        System.exit(0);
    }


    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Runnable runnable = new JavaSpeak();
        Thread t = new Thread(runnable);
        t.start();
     }

}

Simply put freetts.jar and jsapi.jar from the distribution into your classpath, and type

java com.samjdalton.speakie.JavaSpeak

to run the demo (an empty line followed by a carriage return will terminate the program)