Text-to-Speech on James Montgomery

API Diversions

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

Recently reinvigorated with my new UI work, I set myself to task with simplifying the front end player code. No matter how I looked at it, I’d needed to rewrite the back end API to support a front end rewrite. But what if I didn’t precisely need to do that? Enter stage left, Cloudflare Workers.

Below I explain how I arrived at this. If you would like to view the Worker code, you can do so here. If you would like to view the sites (and compare), you may do so here:

New UI for my text-to-speech player

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

My previous user interface (UI) could be, at best described as functional. Whilst it technically worked on any platform I tested, a desktop browser received the best experience. Recently @suivethefirst recommended Bootstrap to me. So I tried to make a better experience with this.

Putting the minimum into MVP

Putting together the UI as it stood was the last functional step in my project. Delivering an audio player with a combination of CSS and JavaScript felt beyond what I had in the tank at the time.

Introducing async to my serverless text-to-speech player for jokes and quotes

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

In this post, I revisit my serverless “jokes and quotes” player. The purpose was to remove the tight coupling between the client request and audio playback API source. To explore the issue, I have introduced DynamoDB to store pre-generated results.

Challenge overview

Logically, all the components of my existing solution depend on each other to succeed to deliver audio to the client. You can visualise it as follows:

The challenge was to accomplish a solution which operated in the following fashion:

A Serverless text-to-speech player for jokes and quotes

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

I decided to dust off my text-to-speech list, implementing a serverless solution delivering random jokes and quotes. You may visit it at this address:

https://tts-ja.mesmontgomery.co.uk/

You can get a preview of the joke quality here:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Note: I can’t affect the humour quality 🤣.

Solution overview

Upon visiting the page, an event triggers calls to the API routes for their relative jokes and quotes. Contained in the API response is the source audio for the HTML5 audio controls.

TTS project update 1 - adding texture to my generated speech

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

In this post, I’d like to share an update on work to address some of the limitations in my text to speech project for Elite Dangerous.. Namely:

Single voice is used for the synthesis; and
Pitch, tone and emphasis are unchanged from defaults.

If you’d like to see the result of the work so far, here is a brief overview video, I’ll describe how we got here below:

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech with PowerShell

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

In this post, I’ll walk through the basics of using PowerShell to interact with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API. Partly a documentation exercise and somewhat a guide I’d like to have been able to read when I started on my Elite Dangerous Google Cloud Text-to-Speech project.

As such, we’ll start with a basic script to produce an audio file and explain how that works. Later I’ll walk through some parameters of interest to affect the response. Lastly, I’ll introduce how we can use SSML for a variation in response.