Is it possible to make "HTML to speech" same like "Text to speech"?

Question

I have one weird requirement that in my existing app I have Text2Speech and for that, I have used AVSpeechSynthesizer to speech text, but now the requirement changed and now I need to convert HTML files data to text something like HTML2Speech.

One Solution we can think:

use HTML parsing and get all text from HTML and use same framework for Text2Speech.

But the client doesn't want that type of parsing and he wants any API or framework which is providing directly HTML2Speech feature.

Any suggestion or help will be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

As I have worked with HTML parsing and text2speech here you can go with 2 steps 1.get Attribute string from HTML file with below code works in iOS7+

As per your client perspective : if there is any API in market for HTML2Speech may be its Paid or you are depended on that API if you use any. While Native framework will help same what you/client wants.

Step 1:

[[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithData:[htmlString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] 
                                 options:@{NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSHTMLTextDocumentType,
                                           NSCharacterEncodingDocumentAttribute: @(NSUTF8StringEncoding)} 
                      documentAttributes:nil error:nil];

Then you can pass this Attributed String in AVSpeechUtterance

Step 2: use below method to get HTML2String:

/**
 *  "ConvertHTMLtoStrAndPlay" : This method will convert the HTML to String 
 synthesizer.
 *
 *  @param aURLHtmlFilePath : "object of html file path"
 */
-(void)ConvertHTMLtoStrAndPlay:(UIButton*)aBtnPlayPause
                isSpeechPaused:(BOOL)speechPaused
      stringWithHTMLAttributes:(NSAttributedString*)aStrWithHTMLAttributes
{

    if (synthesizer.speaking == NO && speechPaused == NO) {

        AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [[AVSpeechUtterance alloc] initWithString:aStrWithHTMLAttributes.string];
        //utterance.rate = AVSpeechUtteranceMinimumSpeechRate;

        if (IS_ARABIC) {
            utterance.voice = [AVSpeechSynthesisVoice voiceWithLanguage:@"ar-au"];
        }else{
            utterance.voice = [AVSpeechSynthesisVoice voiceWithLanguage:@"en-au"];
        }

        [synthesizer speakUtterance:utterance];
    }
    else{
        [synthesizer pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate];
    }

    if (speechPaused == NO) {
        [synthesizer continueSpeaking];
    } else {
        [synthesizer pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate];
    }

}

and as usual while you need to stop use below code to stop Speech.

/**
 *  "StopPlayWithAVSpeechSynthesizer" : this method will stop the playing of audio on the application.
 */
-(void)StopPlayWithAVSpeechSynthesizer{

    // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
    [synthesizer stopSpeakingAtBoundary:AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate];
}

Hope This will help you to get HTML2Speech feature.

Answer 2

There's two parts to a solution here...

1. Presumably you don't care about the formatting in the HTML--after all, by the time it gets to the speech synthesizer, this text is to be spoken, not viewed. AVSpeechSynthesizer takes plain text, so you just need to get rid of the HTML markup. One easy way to do that is to create an NSAttributedString from the HTML, then ask that attributed string for its underlying plain-text string to pass text to the synthesizer.

2. In iOS 10 you don't even have to extract the string from an attributed string — you can pass an attributed string directly to AVSpeechUtterance.