SAPI just as frontend ?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Perlmonks,

we have developed a personalized text-to-speech program, for patients with ALS/MND or other illnesses in which they are in danger of losing their voice. By recording their individual voices for around 3 hours in an early stage of their illness we can produce a tts program with which they can later express whatever they want in their own previous voice !

The program is written mainly in PERL with a TCL/TK front end, which works mainly as an Editor for the inputted sentences. It works on Win32 operating System and can be combined with most on-screen-keyboards and head/eye-tracking mouse devices.

As it is an individual solution, it was not conceived as a SAPI voice... but some Firms just allow SAPI voices as outputs in their devices. In order to make my tts program compatible with these devices, I wonder if somebody can help me to develop a PERL front end, that will look to the outside world as one more SAPI voice, but will just transfer the wanted sentence (and perhaps some parameters like the sound volume) to my "editor" program and be processed and outputted as speech by my tts program.

Thanks in advance for your help !!
Dr. Eduardo Mendel (Dr. in Physics)

mendel@uni-oldenburg.de
Tel.: 0049-441-72261
www.meine-eigene-Stimme.de (German Version)
www.meine-eigene-Stimme.de/Dilo.html (Spanish Version)
The English is still being developed... help welcomed !

Comment on SAPI just as frontend ?

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Re: SAPI just as frontend ? by Anonymous Monk on May 28, 2012 at 02:43 UTC
Well, I would start with "Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1\Samples\CPP\Engines\TTS" from Microsoft Speech SDK Setup 5.1 (Speech API (SAPI) SDK 5.1) update: seems all you need is MkVoice (SAPI 5.4), feed it a list of words that correspond to wav files, and you're done (it creates a voice font for you)	[reply]
Re: SAPI just as frontend ? by Anonymous Monk on May 28, 2012 at 02:46 UTC
The English is still being developed... help welcomed ! In the interim you can link to automatic translator, such a translate.google.com	[reply]
Re: SAPI just as frontend ? by bulk88 (Priest) on May 30, 2012 at 07:00 UTC
I would say all the difficulty is in the SAPI api, not in Perl. If you can figure out how to do it in C or Visual Basic, you can do it in Perl, almost. Here are 2 nodes use C++ COM objects without any compiler and SAPI and Win32::OLE's broken WithEvents I wrote up that use Perl and SAPI but they don't directly help in what your trying to do. Looking at my hard drive, sapi voices are DLLs, and are COM libraries in and of themselves. I do believe that SAPI can create such a DLL for you though because of the MkVoice example app.	[reply]