sayd - OS X say(1) as a service

Produce streamable spoken sentences via a simple HTTP service.

We tried to tweak espeak on Linux to sound natural but couldn't get close enough to the Mac OS X say(1) command. Instead of replacing all of our speaking raspberry pis with mac minis we thought it was simpler to use mplayer on these machines to reach out to a simple service running on an old macbook.

Both GET and POST return an AIFF (Content-type: audio/aiff) that can be played via a browser, mplayer or VLC.

GET /[voice].[format]?[sentence]

That's the easiest way to test with your browser, the following URL gets Alex to say hello:

http://localhost:9999/alex?hello

If your browser does not support AIFF and you have ffmpeg installed on the sayd server, you can also try:

http://localhost:9999/alex.mp3?hello

POST /[voice].[format]

Use this from curl or your app, the body of the POST contains the sentence or words you want to get. The advantage is that you don't need to worry about URL encoding.

Installation

Copy sayd.conf to /etc and change the port if needed, start it with "sayd" or wrap it with supervisor.

Requirements

• Go 1.2+
• A Mac.
• github.com/jessevdk/go-flags