Adding Text to Speech to OSD335x Products is Easy
With the introduction of Siri, Cortana, Alexa and other voice based personal assistants; communicating with computers using voice has become the order of the day. Voice communication also makes things more intuitive and definitely cooler. People have been using various versions of electronic speech synthesis since the 1950’s and it has come a long way since our Founder, Gene Frantz helped develop the Speak & Spell, utilizing the first single-chip voice synthesizer. However, the most famous Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesizer was used by the great scientist, Stephen Hawking, starting in the late 1980’s as a result of degradation of his natural abilities from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Dr Hawking’s synthesizer went silent this month, and the scientific community for speech synthesis and many other areas are grateful for his tremendous contributions.
Since TTS technology has matured, many resources are available including open source libraries like eSpeak and Flite that can be easily incorporated into projects. This article helps you install and use TTS synthesizers for any board using the OSD335x family.