Actionscript Text To Speech

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import ps.GText2Speech.TextToSpeech;
import ps.GTranslate.Language;
 
textToSpeech = new TextToSpeech();
textToSpeech.Lang = Language.ENGLISH;
textToSpeech.addEventListener("FirstClipLoaded", beginPlaying);
textToSpeech.load('Ever wanted to add text to speech functionality to your Actionscript project? Well now you can thanks to Google and this awesome little as3 class I’ve written.');
 
function beginPlaying(event:Event):void
{
   textToSpeech.play();
}

41 Comments

1. 

   Fardeen | May 27, 2010 at 10:57 am

   Nice ! Thx for your class.

2. 

   jonathan | May 28, 2010 at 12:02 pm

   This is really nice… a feature I think would be cool is caching. Maybe something that runs the entire spectrum of the application and can be included in its assest or on the http domain of the application.

   Rock on

3. 

   Edgar Jimenez | July 1, 2010 at 6:29 pm

   There is no sound in Internet Explorer 8

4. 

   Sasi | July 28, 2010 at 11:24 am

   Hi,

   I’m getting error like this,

   Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error.
   at net.peteshand::TextToSpeech/loadSpeech()
   at net.peteshand::TextToSpeech/load()
   at main()

   Thanks,
   -Sasi

5. 

   hcsaba | August 27, 2010 at 2:41 pm

   Hi,
   This don’t work in Opera and IE for me
   Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error.
   at net.peteshand::TextToSpeech/loadSpeech()
   at net.peteshand::TextToSpeech/load()
   at main()

6. 

   Pete Shand | August 27, 2010 at 5:21 pm

   yeah I been told about this… just don’t have time to look into it right now…
   If you or anyone for that matter fixes it let me know.

7. 

   Paul Hinrichsen | September 10, 2010 at 9:24 am

   Hi

   I was hoping to try out this code but when I try to run the downloaded file I get an error opening the .fla in Flash CS4 – “Unexpected file format”. Perhaps you wrote it in Flash CS5 ? If you did is it possible to save it as a CS4 file and include a download of the CS4 file. Thanks.

   Paul

8. 

   Pete Shand | September 11, 2010 at 5:07 am

   Hi Paul
   Yeah they were saved for CS5, I’ve saved them down to CS4 and re-uploaded.

9. 

   Paul Hinrichsen | September 11, 2010 at 3:11 pm

   Hi Pete

   Thank you VERY much for taking time to save in CS4 on my behalf – although I am pretty sure there are others out there equally appreciative.

   I ran it but got a few errors which I will now try to resolve.

   I am looking for something which will turn text to speech and run on a mobile – hopefully without needing to access the internet and hopefully in AS 2 since only Flashlite 4 will run AS 3 and its not available on any mobiles yet.

   So thats a pretty tall order.

   I appreciate access to your work !

   Regards

   Paul

10. 

    musera | January 17, 2011 at 12:47 pm

    This is very cool but I have a problem using it.

    I am trying to use it speak a Japanese sentence. I’ve got it all set up correctly and speaking but have an issue. What I get is if I give it romaji (ex. konnichiwa), it will just speak the letters. If I give it hiragana (ex. こんにちは) I don’t get any speech.

    I’m assuming the speech engine requires Japanese characters (katakana, hiragana and kanji) but I’m guessing the class has an issue with unicode. I cannot figure out any other reason.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated, I want this sorted asap so I can release.

    If I can find your email I will email you as well, just cause you will find this message otherwise.

    Thanks a lot for the class though. If I can get it working it will immensely help with this project I am working on.

11. 

    musera | January 17, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    Just a lead on from my last comment.

    I have done some testing and still don’t know where the issue is but I have discovered a couple of things.

    I have been working with the following string “はがき hagaki” The first part of the string just is hagaki written in hiragana. What I hear from this is ” H A G A K I”, the spaces at the start just mean silence followed by each letter being spoken individually.

    Using trace I have discovered query which gets created is: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=はがき hagaki

    Putting that into a browser will allow you to hear “hagaki H A G A K I”. This confirms my earlier assumption that it cannot support romaji (Japanese written with English letters), the other thing it shows is that it can read the first part of my string correctly.

    So I have no idea where the error is. Google is giving what it should and the URL your class creates is correctly, so that leaves the only place for error being the playing of the mp3 … which makes no sense to me.

    … I am now a bit confused. I will investigate further and post here if I can solve the issue.

12. 

    Pete Shand | January 17, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    Hi there

    You may be right, it might have something to do with the encoding of the characters.
    Although looking into it, it may also simply be that google is yet to add support for this.

    it you type http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=こんにちは directly into your browser, it will speak in japanese, however if you change the tl to en, eg: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=こんにちは a blank audio file is returned.

    Hope this helps… well probably not, but it may save you a bit of time…

13. 

    musera | January 17, 2011 at 2:05 pm

    Thanks for your quick reply. I have managed to make a partial fix, only partial because of Internet Explorer.

    The problem lies in the URL, I don’t understand the reason but it doesn’t work. The fix is simple, in the file TextToSpeech.as find the function loadspeech(). The first line should read:
    var url:String = ‘http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=‘ + Lang + ‘&q=’ + queries[index];

    Change that to:

    var url:String = ‘http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=‘ + Lang + ‘&q=’ + encodeURIComponent(queries[index]);

    What this does is simple changes special characters into escape characters.

    Example:
    Original: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=はがき hagaki
    Fix: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=%E3%81%AF%E3%81%8C%E3%81%8D%20hagaki

    This works in both Google Chrome and Firefox but not IE.

14. 

    mnakashima | February 23, 2011 at 9:08 am

    Hi,

    When I open this app in IE or Chrome, it isn’t work, how can I fix it?

15. 

    Pete Shand | February 23, 2011 at 9:35 am

    Hi there

    yep there is a Security Error

    “SecurityError: Error #2000: No active security context.”

    You may be able to get around this by playing around with line 114 in gTTS.TextToSpeech and adding a context…

    Or another way around it would be to use a server side proxy which is located on the same domain as your application.
    If i had the time I’d look into myself, but sadly I’m pretty flat out these days.

    If you have any luck it’d be great to hear what you’ve done to get around the issue.

16. 

    Pete Shand | February 23, 2011 at 9:51 am

    just tried adding a SoundLoaderContext, however it doesn’t work because its on a different domain without a crossdomain xml… so looks like a proxy is the way to go

17. 

    Pete Shand | February 23, 2011 at 9:54 am

    you might find this helpful:
    http://www.abdulqabiz.com/blog/archives/2007/05/31/php-proxy-script-for-cross-domain-requests/

18. 

    Blan | March 11, 2011 at 5:48 am

    Hi Pete!

    Can i change the voice to man?

19. 

    Pete Shand | March 16, 2011 at 12:02 pm

    unfortunately doesn’t look like you can do this right now.
    Some languages have a male voice, other a female voice, however this may change in the future.

20. 

    Daniel | March 29, 2011 at 3:56 pm

    to solve the browser issue i tried to use the suggested proxy fix:
    var url:String = ‘http://petzooba.com/proxy.php?url='+encodeURIComponent('http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=‘ + Lang + ‘&q=’ + queries[index]);

    i even tried it with an audio mime type:
    var url:String = ‘http://petzooba.com/proxy.php?url='+encodeURIComponent('http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=‘ + Lang + ‘&q=’ + queries[index]) + &mimeType=audio/basic

    now none of the browsers work whereas before (without proxy) only Firefox works. any other ideas? or am i doing this wrong?

21. 

    Daniel | March 29, 2011 at 4:27 pm

    supplemental: IE8 only works after a long load time, that is, load the page without changing the text, go eat your dinner, come back and hit “speak”. weird.

22. 

    Daniel Kazmer | March 29, 2011 at 6:01 pm

    definitive browser fix:
    var url:String = ‘http://domain.com/proxy.php?url=http://translate.google.com/translate_tts%3Ftl=‘ + Lang + ‘%26q=’ + encodeURIComponent(queries[index]);

    AND:
    find ‘val += ” “;’
    and change to ‘val += “+”;’

    there ya go! (took me a whole day of deductive fiddling)

23. 

    Pete Shand | April 4, 2011 at 10:42 am

    awesome, nice work!

24. 

    Daniel Kazmer | April 4, 2011 at 1:35 pm

    there seems to be a conflict between the browser fix and the correct pronunciation of special characters (accents …). both will not work at the same time.

25. 

    Daniel Kazmer | April 5, 2011 at 10:40 am

    i’ve narrowed the problem to this: in the php proxy if i say $url = header(‘Location: ‘.$url);, then it works perfectly but only in Firefox. otherwise it works in all browsers but again, the gibberish on the special characters…
    perhaps the incorporation of the above line defeats the purpose of the proxy…
    in the file i also tried fiddling with the urldecode function and putting a header for content-type on top of the page but no luck so far. any thoughts on the matter?

26. 

    Pete Shand | April 5, 2011 at 10:54 am

    hmmm would you be able to post the proxy file so i can have a look?

27. 

    Daniel Kazmer | April 5, 2011 at 11:01 am
28. 

    Daniel Kazmer | April 5, 2011 at 11:03 am

    http://beta.petzooba.com/proxy.php

29. 

    Pete Shand | April 5, 2011 at 11:05 am

    or better yet, just paste the code that is contained within the proxy

30. 

    Daniel Kazmer | April 5, 2011 at 11:09 am

    also, in the TextToSpeech.as file, the query function should have the line ‘val += “%2B”;’ so when using the urldecode function in the proxy, it properly decodes that as a ‘+’

31. 

    Daniel Kazmer | April 5, 2011 at 11:10 am

    i tried pasting the code. the post came up blank

32. 

    Pete Shand | April 5, 2011 at 11:17 am

    actually that email has been playing up… try apocalypticsam@gmail.com

33. 

    GP | May 20, 2011 at 4:54 am

    Could I have a copy of the proxy.php file as well please?
    I am losing my head around…
    thank you very much,

34. 

    Pete Shand | May 20, 2011 at 3:25 pm

    No problem, I’ve updated the above zip file to include the proxy

35. 

    GP | May 20, 2011 at 6:17 pm

    uhm… i tried
    var url:String = ‘http://test.domain.com/proxy/proxy.php?url=http://translate.google.com/translate_tts%3Ftl=‘ + Lang + ‘%26q=’ + encodeURIComponent(queries[index]);

    but it doesn’t work, please any advice?

    thanx

36. 

    teo | July 25, 2011 at 6:15 am

    Does anyone knows what’s the file type? mp3 or wav?

37. 

    Pete Shand | July 25, 2011 at 7:30 am

    mp3

38. 

    Drew Bennett | July 29, 2011 at 4:32 pm

    Thanks for a great set of code snippets.
    Is there any way to change the voice to male?

39. 

    Ludvik | August 8, 2011 at 8:13 am

    Hello,

    I made small adobe air app for vocabulary learning and one of the functionality is voice pronunciation via google tts (translate.google.com/translate_tts) and also downloading mp3 and creating wav files containing word+pause+translation.

    Unfortunately, google made some restriction, that if it’s used too much, sound is not produced and screen with captcha is displayed instead to verify that it’s human, who want to use this service. This is not good for my application of course because voice pronunciation works on one button click with no browser involved.

    I’m using it via proxy file and it worked fine for one year. Now I would need to get mp3 files without proxy, directly as it would be via browser.

    Please, is there any way, how to do that?

    Thanks a lot

40. 

    Pete Shand | August 27, 2011 at 12:38 pm

    not to sure dude, i guess because its not a public api there is no guaranty that its going to work.

41. 

    Pete Shand | August 27, 2011 at 12:39 pm

    Doesn’t look like it. some languages are male, others are female.