VoiceDroid : A Text-To-Speech application for PC
Speech plays a very important role in all our lives. It is a way of communicating with others. Speech makes it so easy to express your feelings. Also, this is one of the main reasons why it is not so easy to interact with a computer or a robot. You require a particular kind of knowledge to interact with them. A child who just learned talking cannot use a computer. You need to know how to use a mouse, keyboard etc. If our computers could speak and listen like people, the age range of computer users would expand significantly. And this could bring a big change in the society.
A lot of companies have developed software to recognize voice commands and perform an action. But it is not very effective. Because, there are many accents in the world and it is hard, even for a computer, to understand all of them. Yet, apps like google now and siri are doing a great job. They can recognize any kind of accent and language. They get the commands right almost all the time.
A few years ago, the voice recognition was at it's worst. If you'd command your phone to “open facebook” it would say “calling mom..”. It was very inaccurate.
There is also a concept called “text-to-speech”. Google has a text-to-speech app for android. But it is not of much use for everyone, definitely not an app I would share with someone. It just reads out everything on the screen. When I downloaded it for the first time, I expected it to be a proper app which lets you convert any text you want into speech. But sadly that's not the case. I thought is would be really good if you could type in any text you want and have the computer speak it out. Also, we don't have such an app for the PC. For the PC, we have the “voice recognition” which barely understands what I say. I am sure many of you reading this would like an app that would make the computer speak any text you type.
VoiceDroid
So I have developed a small desktop application called VoiceDroid. What voiceDroide does is, it converts a given text to voice and outputs it through your speakers. It wasn't too hard to make. I used an open source library and google translate voice files to make it. So basically the voice you hear is the same as the google translate voice.
It is a very simple app to use. You just have to type in what you want to hear, choose the accent and click on “Speak”. It is completely free of cost. I am not very good at programming, but I have tried my best. If you have any suggestions you are more than welcome to share. In fact, if you are interested, I can give you the source code and you can add or remove whatever you want. I have written it in java and it is pretty simple to understand.
VoiceDroid gives you a choice of 4 accents: American, British, French and Indian (Hindi). There are many accents/languages that google offers, but I chose these. If you want some other language, I can give you a customized one.
The quality of the voice is the best in the world because it's what google uses. And also, all the voices are female's if anybody knows if google has a male version, please let me know in the comments.
Here is how to get VoiceDroid:
- Click here
- Give the required details (will not be misused) and click on submit.
- You will be provided with the download link
I hope you find this fun to use. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can comment below or you can use the “contact us” tab located on the right-hand side. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
Thank you,
Cheers!!