IDEA - speak_text - Activating speech TTS on the client

[lordfingle]

I am developing minetest for education.

In the past I have used "os.execute()" to do Text To Speech. It was suggested that this was a less that nice solution..... ahem

Obviously this doesn't work on servers and I am discovering I can't make it work on Android.

With this in mind I'm suggesting the lua command "player:speak_text(textToSpeak)" that invokes the client based synthesizer.

I am hanging this of the player object, as I feel it is effectively an extension of the player's hud. Do you agree?

I am currently prototyping this for Android successfully and would be able to implement this for Windows and MacOS.

What say you all about this being a good idea?

[MineYoshi]

Well... Always that has good performance is ok!
If you try to implement a "Text2Speech" engine in Minetest then i don't know if the game can lag a bit...

[srifqi]

I don't know how to send another type of packet to client...

EDIT: Actually, I forget what I want to say.

[lordfingle]

I was thinking of calling the platform specific TTS API, not compiling in another library.
I know how to do this for Android and Windows...not so sure about Linux though (other than shelling out to run the espeak commandline)

[Sokomine]

TTS would be great for mobs. NPC could start talking to the player, so this could be a very useful feature. Has any progress been made on this?

[lordfingle]

We are testing this in the "eidy" branch here:

https://github.com/dgt0011/minetest/tree/eidy

Currently it uses Android TTS (whatever engine is installed on the device) and the "espeak" commandline for Windows, Mac and Linux, which is a bit fiddly.

I would like to call the Windows/Mac APIs directly.

I'm not sure there is a speech API for Linux?