Text to speech converter

Question

I am going to create a Text to speech converter, which can be executed in both Windows, and Linux based systems. Can someone please help me answer the following questions;

1. What language should i use; Java, C++ or any other?
2. The program i am going to create should be able to read large chunks of data.
3. There should be good sound quality.
4. What are the libraries available to achieve this?

Please share your experiences as well.

Answer 1

1. Use the language you're most comfortable with. I learned the hard way when I tried to re-code my raytracer in C++, coming from a Python background. It took me weeks to get it to function...

   Basically, you'll get frustrated by the nuances of a new language before you can get to coding something, so I suggest you stick with what you know.

2. That's independent of the language. Just makes sure to read the data in chunks (like 2048 kilobytes at a time). Reading a big file to RAM is not a great idea, as you can't be sure your end user has enough RAM (audio files can get BIG).

3. This is trivial. I can't help you program good sound quality. That's up to you.

4. There exist a few implementations of TTS for Linux, so that's all I can recommend. Look at Festival, as it is one of the ones you can actually understand.