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.


10 comments

  1. Martin

    Awesome! Even more awesome it would have been if the embeded video was a little bigger :)

    May 26th, 2010 at 10:36

  2. José Pedro Arvela

    Am I the only one seeing in this demo the possibility for the creation of a text to speech system that can be compared with Opera’s.

    May 26th, 2010 at 13:29

  3. José Pedro Arvela

    * as an addon.

    May 26th, 2010 at 13:30

  4. Jim Massey

    There has been an addon that does this for a while now. The flite component currently only works on linux and it’s big because it includes 4 voices but ….

    May 26th, 2010 at 13:55

  5. 29a

    It would be so cool if it would also be possible to access the microphone (and webcam for ).

    May 27th, 2010 at 04:03

  6. Wurdebalg Hurrst

    No more need for Flash for such things? Hooray!

    May 27th, 2010 at 11:53

  7. […] Fast JavaScript and Audio: Speech Synthesis in Your Browser ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer … (tags: javascript) […]

    May 27th, 2010 at 15:09

  8. Toto

    Hi, I’m very interesed, but I cannot read flash, do you have a direct link to the video ?

    May 31st, 2010 at 00:50

    1. Richard

      http://vimeo.com/12039415 Viewable in html5

      June 15th, 2010 at 05:45

  9. Tim Wessman

    Hi, your Web Audio Data API demos look great! I have been experimenting lot with audio on JavaScript, but only with tools on official FireFox build. I think I should start to look deeper into your API, which I hope to solve most of my JavaScript audio problems. But is there some schedule or hopes about when this API would come to official FireFox build?

    Have a look, you may like my minimalistic JavaScript sound synthesis demo. http://www.lossidesign.fi/audio.html

    August 25th, 2010 at 01:22

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