iOS Text To Speech Api

Question

I can't seem to find anything on this. Are there any Siri classes or API's in iOS7 that let you do text to speech? All I am trying to do is something like the following:

[siriInstance say:@"This is a test"]; 

And then have Siri say it from my app.

It seems we should be capable of doing this, no? Seems like a trivial thing.

Answer 1

Since iOS 7 you have a new TTS Api.

In Objective C

AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer alloc]init]; AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:@"Some text"]; [utterance setRate:0.2f]; [synthesizer speakUtterance:utterance]; 

In Swift

let synthesizer = AVSpeechSynthesizer() let utterance = AVSpeechUtterance(string: "Some text") utterance.rate = 0.2 

You can also change the voice like this :

utterance.voice = AVSpeechSynthesisVoice(language: "fr-FR") 

And then speek

• In Swift 2 synthesizer.speakUtterance(utterance)

• In Swift 3 synthesizer.speak(utterance)

Don't forget to import AVFoundation

Helpful methods

You can Stop or Pause all speech using these two methods :

- (BOOL)pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:(AVSpeechBoundary)boundary; - (BOOL)stopSpeakingAtBoundary:(AVSpeechBoundary)boundary; 

The AVSpeechBoundary indicates if the speech should pause or stop immediately (AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate) or it should pause or stop after the word currently being spoken (AVSpeechBoundaryWord).

Check the AVSpeechSynthesizer Doc