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
Comments
this sir, is exactly what I’m after…. cheers for that
do you have, or know of, a version for sapi4? i like those voices better, and have a specific application for which sapi4 is more suitable. please shoot me an email, even if the answer is no, so i ‘ll know. thanks,
–copycat
It shouldnt make a difference whether you have SAPI4 or 5 installed. Although i havent tested SAPI4 myself, i dont see why this tool shouldnt work with it.
Give it a try and let me know the result :)
Dan,
Any way to change the default output settings? I was looking for:
128kps
16 bit
1 channel (Mono)
8 kHz sample rate
PCM
Keep in touch, David
Sorry for the late reply.
Currently there is no way to change the output setting without changing inside the source code.
I may add options for these at some point, but i don’t have time currently.
So either you must change the sourcecode or convert wave-file manually using another tool.
Hello,
i’ve been using this software for quite some time. Thanks a lot.
I was now wondering if it would be possible to make it work directly to standard output, in order to be able to redirect it to a named pipe, so that one could execute it faster.
Thanks alot.
Best Regards