Text to Speech

mlapl1

Hello Everyone, it's been a while...

Is there a way of connecting Lectora to a good quality text to speech converter? I would like to be able to display a page and then play the contents of selected text fields.

If such a converter does exist, would you kindly tell me where to find it and (if possible) how to connect to it?

Thank you for your help as ever.

mnotermans5114

DragonSpeakingNaturally... from Nuance ( https://www.nuance.com ) is one of the best voice recognition tools and with it you can literally control your computer by voice...but its pricey.

Google voice recognition is cheaper...and works well too...
https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/

Ah wait you want it the other way around... text2speech...
https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/

Easiest to implement would be a javascript library...well try these...
https://responsivevoice.org/
https://github.com/Hagsten/Talkify
https://www.npmjs.com/package/text-to-speech-js
https://www.masswerk.at/mespeak/

Quite interesting options... gonna mockup a sample :-)

mlapl1

Thank you, Math. As usual, you are a mine of information and help. I had identified responsivevoice as a possibility but not the others. Any mockup would be hugely helpful.

 

mlapl1

Hello again

I have managed to get the responsivevoice API to work quite well although the quality of the English voices bothers me a bit and I still cannot do everything I want.

BTW...  I am cleary getting rusty with Lectora. Is there a Lectora variable associated with the contents of a textblock? I thought there was but cannot seem to find one.

Thank you!

mnotermans5114

No variable thats specifically linked to the contents of a textfield. However you can use actions to set the content of a textfield to some variables value...or use Javascript to get the content of a specific textfield... jQuery / Vanilla javascript or GSAP solutions for that allover my posts...

lsilver

Just a quick update to let you know Lectora 18.1 includes a new Text to Speech feature which allows you to choose from a variety of language accents/pronunciations, voices, and you can use SSML markup to add pauses, breaks, and more. Hopefully this will help you in your future TTS endeavors!

struitt

Hi all...sorry to piggy back on this thread, but I got so excited about the new Text-To-Speech feature I downloaded 18.1 as soon as I got the email.

However, the drop-downs for 'Language' and 'Voice' are blank.

What am I missing?

carlfink

@Steven: I suspect you are now a beta tester. Not on purpose, just that Trivantis clearly didn't finish testing 18.1 before pushing it out.

bparker2032

We are looking into that issue. We can not reproduce it

wheels

Hi @struitt

It appears you have internet because the TTS dialog loads. Do you have an anti-virus or firewall which could be blocking the requests we are doing to get the data to populate the drop lists? Can you try temporarily disabling these to see if it is the issue?

Thanks
- Joe

struitt

It appears a post I thought I made after the one above didn't actually post.  That post was "Aaaaaand now it works."

That being said, I closed Lectora and opened it back up and the lists were there.  My coworker had to do the same thing.

And I must say...I like this new feature!

hplrsmom

I posted on this yesterday but can't find my post. I have the same empty dropdown boxes issue with version 18.2, which I downloaded yesterday. I have since shut down and rebooted my machine, relaunched Lectora, and I still have empty dropdowns. Has anyone else found a different solution?

wheels

Hi Carol (@hplrsmom)

We are fixing an issue that some people have seen in v18.2 where an action target drop list is empty when the action is attached to an object such that "this object" would be in the target list.

We will have the update available by tomorrow (10/3).

hplrsmom

Hello! Is this available yet? I didn't see anything new in downloads; I need to know soon if I need to pursue professional services for a project. Thank you.

wheels

Hi Carol (@hplrsmom)

It is available, I was talking about a different drop list issue, not the TTS related drop lists. If you are having issues with the TTS drop lists then the new version might not fix it. Let us know.

https://www.trivantis.com/service-pack-downloads/

- Joe

hplrsmom

Hi! I have tried twice to download 18.2.1 and both times received an error that it couldn't be downloaded. The file it created is Inspire_Install_v18.2.1.exe.uz6h5by.partial.

tea

Hi Carol, can you make sure you have enough space for the download?  Can you also use a wired connection if you're wireless?  We're not seeing this issue with the downloading

hplrsmom

Thanks for the suggestion; it was apparently a folder limitation. Deleting the last two Lectora updates gave me space. The Text to Speech dropdown boxes are still not populated. Bummer.

hplrsmom

Hi Joe. I downloaded 18.2.1 and the TTS dropdowns are still unpopulated. Have you isolated what is causing the issue for some and not for others?

tea

Hi Carol, in a previous post it was mentioned that closing and reopening Lectora cleared unpopulated dropdown.  Can you try this and let us know if it clears your issue?  This may help us in determining what is going on, we have not been able to recreate this here so far.

hplrsmom

Hi! I had done that previously, without success. I just closed and relaunched Lectora and the dropdowns still do no work.

tea

OK, thanks for the update. I'll let Joe and the other developers know, hopefully we can get something figured out.

tea

Hi Carol, I brought this up at our status meeting. One of our other testers was seeing this and noticed he was getting a js error. He traced that down to his time being off on on his PC. Once he set his time zone and system time to the correct time it was ok for him.

Can you check your time and time zone, let us know if that resolves the issue?

hplrsmom

Hi! I just checked and they are correct.

tea

Hi Carol, is your PC set to sync with an internet time server?  The only way we've been able to get the empty drop downs is with the time off, but I'm not sure how much it needs to be off. I reset my time slightly and had the error, but I typically run with sync to time.windows.com.  Can you check that one last thing, then I'll update dev and see what me may try next

hplrsmom

I'm looking at my Date & Time settings. "Set time automatically" is on and grayed out so I can't change it. I can't tell what they're using as the standard.