Presenting “sapi2wav”. (name choosen because text2wav was already taken)

Its a simple windows tool that allows you to do Text-To-Speech on command line.

The program will play a text given as argument or read a file and output to a wave file. It also allows you to choose other voices, if eg. you have NeoSpeech voices or AT&T Natural voices.

Its free (unlike any other commandline SAPI program ive found) and its Open Source (GPL).

Commandline processing is a MUST for any form of scripting or automation. I wanted to automaticly transfer daily news-stories to and MP3 player and now i can :)
Usage is as simple as:

sapi2wav.exe c:\out.wav 1 -t “Hello world”

TextAloud has a commandline mode, but its very oddly written, pretty beta and doesnt run under Linux. I wrote to Text Aloud (or NextUp.com) explaining my very insignificant problem and of course they didnt reply. So instead of buying their product, i ended up making an open source alternative :).

So if you install SAPI5 under wine (must be installed in windows ME compatability mode), then you can run this tool under wine as well and do commandline magic :)

Downloads:

• sapi2wav.exe
• source code (delphi)

Setting up MS-SAPI5 under wine should be as easy as configuring your wine to run in Windows ME mode, then download and run MS’s Sapi5 installer (msi - the Win ME version)

Winehq has an article on how to do this.

The tool SayPad from this page should have sapi5 included in the 95/98/me installer.. Though i havent testet it, i guess if you can install SayPad under wine, youll get the needed api’s.

please send me any changes you might make to this sapi to wav tool.

  - Dan