This is a node.js webserver that wraps a C# application that wraps an ancient DLL from a text-to-speech application designed for Windows 95 that coincidentally is also the engine used by Moonbase Alpha. Somehow, it works.
I'm not distributing my TTS.exe (and the associated DLLs) due to licensing
concerns, but you can try it out at http://tts.cyzon.us/files/playground.html.
You can also make requests to http://tts.cyzon.us/tts?text=<URL encoded text>
(the server will respond with a redirect to a rendered WAV file). Currently
I've configured the input size limit to be 1024 characters.
The text to speech engine is based on SharpTalk, a .NET wrapper for the FonixTalk text to speech software. I modified it to support the original dectalk.dll again (somewhere in the repo history they switched from DECTalk to its successor FonixTalk, but did not explain exactly why this decision was made) and also added a binding to the native WAV output function in the DLL (rather than the render to memory buffer and then write to file approach that SharpTalk uses which caused problems for me).
This node.js wrapper provides a web interface and calls the text to speech program to render out text to WAV files. The filename is based on a hash of the input string, so it can be cached and served cheaply rather than regenerating it every time. There is also a built in concurrency limit due to the fact that DECTalk's DRM prevents running more than 7 copies at once.
I'm running this on a cheap Windows VM from VirMach since
I was unable to get it running correctly under Wine. If you like it, feel free
to toss a few mBTC to 1LPg2gJxGYZEjBizg9iGhu5sLSe2i2hjA7.
The node.js code in this repository is presented under the BSD 2-Clause simplified license:
Copyright (c) 2015 Calvin Montgomery, All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification,
are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
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