I’m not sure how I managed to miss this, but I just happened to run across a ‘new’ (well, newish), albeit still unofficial, offering of Google today: text-to-speech. You can see what few details there are on this Techcrunch post. Basically, it just boils down to this though – you send your phrase to be spoken in a GET request like so ‘http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hello%20world’, and in return Google gives you an .mp3 formatted sound file of your phrase being spoken in some non-threatening female robot voice. Of course loading .mp3 files into Flash is a piece of cake, so integration with the Flash platform is nothing at all. One can even try their hands by running the trial for integration on a mock api. The one thing that may get you is that Flash doesn’t like to load .mp3’s across domains. A very basic serverside proxy script will get you around that easily enough though. Here’s a quick example. This will take a String phrase and generate the URL to the Google translator for you: [crayon-610bb8e51fe1c502346327/] And here’s an example of a bare minimum proxy in php: [crayon-610bb8e51fe2b651677927/] And put it together (using the Bit-101 MinimalComps): [crayon-610bb8e51fe30565224321/] And that will give […]
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