Fast JavaScript and Audio: Speech Synthesis in Your Browser

If you haven’t been keeping track of David Humphrey’s work to bring audio manipulation to Firefox, you’re missing out. He’s made an update post with a huge number of demos, requiring some of the most recent advances in JavaScript found in Firefox – binary arrays, super-fast tracing-based FFT analysis, etc. This was my favorite bit of his post:

I think that my favourite demo by far this time around is one that I’ve been waiting to see since we first began these experiments. I’ve written in the past that our work could be used to solve many web accessibility problems. A few weeks ago I mentioned on irc that someone should take a shot at building a text to speech engine in JavaScript, now that we have typed arrays. Yury quietly went off and built one based on the flite engine. When you run this, remember that you’re watching a browser speak with no plugins of any kind. This is all done in JavaScript.

Web Audio Data API – Text to Speech Demo from David Humphrey on Vimeo.