I know that the TTS API is not released yet, although people can use it for sentences of 100 characters or less.
I have a web portal at http://www.securecottage.com/cgi-bin/reference.cgi that performs TTS of selected text < 4000 characters. I have the TTS request go through my LINUX box which has festival and espeak installed. I have hacked festival and espeak so they report the ENDTIMES of each word as it is spoken as a javascript array which is reported back to my web application. When the TTS sentence is spoken, the word that is being spoken is selected uniquely at the same time. Thus Karaoke Text To Speech. It's really helpful if you are beginning to learn to speak or listen to a language. I use it to listen to Spanish and French. When I use the text to speech alone I lose track of what word is being spoken in the foreign language sentence. With the karaoke effect (actually my system is either 1 word behind, right on, or 1 word ahead), I can follow which word is being spoken and link the word itself with its sound in a spoken sentence. Text to Speech of foreign languages is good but TTS with karaoke is better if you want to learn to listen to those languages. I have a gadget on Wikipedia that uses the Google language API to translate single words or selected text. I would love to incorporate my karaoke TTS in with it and turn the gadget into a full blown language learning tool. If wikipedia's goal is to banish ignorance then certainly overcoming language barriers is a subsiduary (but important) goal. I can't use my own LINUX box for this as 1) my Internet connection is not very certain 2) my linux box can't service the whole world of wikipedia 24 hours a day If Google released its TTS Api for public use: 1) allowed text to 4000 characters 2) provided a Javascript array of word endtimes and/or a javascript function that performed karaoke on the selected text that would be great. I could provide karaoke TTS to wikipedia users and craft a really good language learning tool for all those people using the wikis to learn a language (which is quite a number). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google AJAX APIs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-ajax-search-api?hl=en.
