Read It To Me

The Internet Archive BookReader now has a real-time Text-To-Speech (TTS) feature to better support our print-disabled users.

Tools

These tools are used to implement the TTS feature:

• Festival and its text2wave utility for speech synthesis
• The cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts Festival voice
• oggenc, which is part of vorbis-tools, for converting wav files to ogg vorbis format for Firefox
• ffmpeg to convert wav files to mp3 format for webkit and flash-enabled browsers
• SoundManager2, which provides a consistent audio API across HTML5 and and flash-enabled browsers

Code

• BookReader.js contains the BookReader TTS code. ** In particular, see the ttsStart(), ttsPlay(), and ttsNextChunk() functions.
• BookReaderGetText.py returns a chunk of OCRed text to feed to the TTS engine.
• BookReaderGetTTS.php takes a text string and produces mp3 or ogg audio data.