Giving voices to your apps

I'm starting to think about developing multimodal interfaces (vision and sound) for Red. With macOS it's quite easy because we can use the ‘say’ system command. For Windows and Linux, I'd be delighted if other developers came up with a similar solution.

Here (https://github.com/ldci/Voices) are a few examples of how to use this command with Red and Rebol 3.

This is an example of Red code:

#!/usr/local/bin/red-view
Red[
Author: "ldci"
needs: view
]
;--for macOS 32-bit (Mojave) 
;--new version 
voices:         []
languages: []
sentences: []
flag:                 1
filename:   %voices.txt
getVoices: does [call/shell/output "say -v '?'" filename]
loadVoices:  does [
vfile: read/lines filename
foreach v vfile [
tmp: split v "#" 
append sentences tmp/2
trim/lines tmp/1
append voices first split tmp/1 space
append languages second split tmp/1 space
]
a/text: sentences/1
f/text: languages/1
]
generate: does [
prog: rejoin ["say -v " voices/:flag " " a/text]
call/shell/wait prog
]
mainWin: layout [
title "Voices"
dp1: drop-down data voices
select 1
on-change [
flag: face/selected
f/text: languages/(face/selected)
a/text: sentences/(face/selected)
]
f: field center
button "Talk" [generate] 
pad 100x0 
button  "Quit" [quit]
return
a: area 450x50
do [unless exists? filename [getVoices] loadVoices]
]
view mainWin

And the GUI result

A very interesting approach is now proposed by Oldes for macOS and Windows: https://github.com/Oldes/Rebol-Speak/releases/tag/0.0.1

Minimalistic but efficient :

#!/usr/local/bin/r3

Rebol [

]

speak: import speak     ;--import module

with speak [

list-voices     ;--list all voices

say/as "Hello Red world!" 15             ;--english voice

say/as "Bonjour Red!" 166     ;--french voice

]

And a Windows equivalent of macOS say developed by Philippe Groarke: https://github.com/p-groarke/wsay?tab=readme-ov-file

And also Jocko's tests for Windows  and macOS: https://github.com/jocko-jc/red-tts

The code was initially developed for Rebol and is now updated for Red.