iOS Text To Speech Api

Question

I can't seem to find anything on this. Are there any Siri classes or API's in iOS7 that let you do text to speech? All I am trying to do is something like the following:

[siriInstance say:@"This is a test"];

And then have Siri say it from my app.

It seems we should be capable of doing this, no? Seems like a trivial thing.

There is no API for Siri – Björn Kaiser Mar 21 '14 at 14:51 — Björn Kaiser, Mar 21 '14 at 14:51

score 157 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 12 '22 at 18:33

Since iOS 7 you have a new TTS Api.

In Objective C

AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer alloc]init];
AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:@"Some text"];
[utterance setRate:0.2f];
[synthesizer speakUtterance:utterance];

In Swift

let synthesizer = AVSpeechSynthesizer()
let utterance = AVSpeechUtterance(string: "Some text")
utterance.rate = 0.2
synthesizer.speak(utterance)

You can also change the voice like this :

utterance.voice = AVSpeechSynthesisVoice(language: "fr-FR")

And then speek

In Swift 2 synthesizer.speakUtterance(utterance)
In Swift 3 synthesizer.speak(utterance)

Don't forget to import AVFoundation

Helpful methods

You can Stop or Pause all speech using these two methods :

- (BOOL)pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:(AVSpeechBoundary)boundary;
- (BOOL)stopSpeakingAtBoundary:(AVSpeechBoundary)boundary;

The AVSpeechBoundary indicates if the speech should pause or stop immediately (AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate) or it should pause or stop after the word currently being spoken (AVSpeechBoundaryWord).

Check the AVSpeechSynthesizer Doc

All of this can be encapsulated into a helper class for doing TTS: https://vijayt.com/post/text-to-speech-in-ios7/ — vijayst, Sep 21 '17 at 04:12

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 19 '17 at 23:56

This is Ali ABBAS' answer for use in a playground:

import UIKit
import AVKit
import AVFoundation
import PlaygroundSupport

var str = "Hello, playground"

let synthesizer = AVSpeechSynthesizer()
let utterance = AVSpeechUtterance(string: str)
utterance.rate = 0.4
utterance.voice = AVSpeechSynthesisVoice(language: "en-US")

//for playground only
let playerViewController = AVPlayerViewController()
PlaygroundPage.current.liveView = playerViewController.view
//

synthesizer.speak(utterance)

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 28 '16 at 11:18

2

I have never done any work specifically with Siri. I may be wrong, but I think integrating with Siri is very difficult using private API's.

I would take a look at the openears framework for IOS. I have done some basic work with this in the past and it does both offline speech recognition and synthesized speech/text-to-speech

Hope this helps you.

edited Jun 28 '16 at 11:18

Jagat Dave

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answered Mar 21 '14 at 14:50

Tim

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were you able to add new voices with openears? – Crashalot Mar 06 '16 at 06:07

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 04 '16 at 09:12

1

Here you will find a text to speech (TTS) sample app (Objective-C) based on this

answered Aug 04 '16 at 09:12

d1jhoni1b

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iOS Text To Speech Api

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