Gem for piping text from Ruby to the Mac OS X say command.
# If you haven't done so yet gem install gemcutter gem tumble gem install mactts
There are two main ways to use this gem. On your system, say you have the sane defaults for the say command (i.e. the say command is in /usr/bin/say and you don’t care about the name of the tempfile). Then you can call the class method “say” to speak what you want with the voice you want:
Mac::TTS.say('This is my text!')
The default is to use the voice ‘Fred’. If you want to use a different voice, then pass a symbolized version of the voice to the command:
Mac::TTS.say('This is my text!', :alex)
A list of valid voices is in the valid_voices class method:
puts Mac::TTS.valid_voices
With the power of Ruby, you can utilize here-docs to make some neat looking code and speak a large amount of text:
Mac::TTS.say(<<-EOT, :alex) This is a test. This is only a test. If this were an actual emergency, I'd be screaming my head off. EOT
If you wish to instantiate the object to change the defaults, feel free to do so:
mactts = Mac::TTS.new(:command => '/path/to/say', :tempfile => 'somename', :voice => :deranged) mactts.say('This is my text!')
Of course, you can always call the accessors for @command, @tempfile, and @voice before the say command in order to get what you want.
The “tempfile” option is just the name of the file created when this gem buffers the text out to disk with the Tempfile command. The reason it is sent to a text file is so that we can utilize large amounts of text and not have to worry about special characters like we would if we just passed it directly to the command line.
Copyright © 2009 Tim Gourley
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <www.gnu.org/licenses/>.