Text To Speech SaaS APIs

About

I recently changed smart phones. My android's touch screen was broken, and I decided to give iPhone 4 a whirl. I mostly think iOS is not so great. Some of the interface responsiveness is better than android. The microphone seems to work a lot better then the one on my HTC. The iPhone/iPad app store makes it almost impossible to find (good)free versions of necessities. Some of the "necessities" I can live without: ssh terminal, vpn client, QR scanner(who makes a new smart phone os without this?), etc.. One I truly missed was a good GPS app. The best free one I found was from mapQuest. The search on map quest GPS is pretty terrible. It's not good at interpreting partial addresses or well known business names, or taking your current location into the search context.

So I decided to make my own. The two requirements that I really cared about where:

  1. Text to speech - iPhone comes with a google GPS map application, but it doesn't talk.
  2. A better search - I don't know 9 digit zip codes off the top of my head

I finally got most of the components working. There are a few caveats that will need some interface improvements. Anyhow... One of the coolest new functionalities to me[as a web developer] was implementing a Text to Speech service on my server. I had in the past used a variety of other text to speech web services [google, vozme], but they all usually seemed to include major drawbacks. I developed it on a local LAMP VM, and it worked pretty well from my LAN. I tried transferring it to the cheapest VPS I could find[fastvps.co - bad idea]... it was too slow to handle the processing. Now it's on a cloud server and running pretty smoothly.

Feel free to use the web map(link below), and the jQuery plugin. The "text" it tries to get from the jQuery object/selector is first ".text()", if that's empty it tries ".val()". It responds with an... audio tag and loads an absolute url to the mp3. The server checks the browser type, if it's Firefox it will send ogg. Feel free to change it, modify it, what ever. I am just trying to offer easy access to the text to speech service. I will probably try to develop plugins for other frameworks in the future.

Examples

link to mp3/ogg:
Example: link
Source: <a target='_blank' href='http://say-that.com/?request=this is how to link text to speech'>link</a>
jQuery:
Example: click here j Query Example Text
Source: <a id='jqSayThatLink' href='javascript:;'>click here</a> <span id='jQueryText'>j Query Example Text</span> ... $('#jqSayThatLink').click(function(){ $('#jQueryText').sayThat(); });
jQuery Dynamic:
Example: click here
Source: <a id='jqSayThatLink2' href='javascript:;'>click here</a> <input id='jQueryText2' value='Normally, both your asses would be dead as fucking fried chicken, but you happen to pull this shit while Im in a transitional period so I dont wanna kill you, I wanna help you. But I cant give you this case, it dont belong to me. Besides, Ive already been through too much shit this morning over this case to hand it over to your dumb ass.'/> ... $('#jqSayThatLink2').click(function(){ $('#jQueryText2').sayThat(); });
jQuery with callback:
Example: click here j Query call back Example Text
Source: <a id='jqSayThatLink3' href='javascript:;'>click here</a> <span id='jQueryText3'>j Query call back Example Text</span> ... $('#jqSayThatLink').click(function(){ $('#jQueryText').sayThat(function(){ alert('callback'); }); });

spoken GPS

spoken GPS web app this does use the text to speech SaaS, but I wrote it before the jQuery plugin.

Download

https://github.com/kylepwarren/sat-that