`speech` — Text-to-Speech on iOS#

The speech module provides speech synthesis and recogntion functionality on iOS.

Note

Speech recognition requires at least iOS 10. Because speech data may be sent to Apple servers for processing, a system-provided privacy alert is automatically shown when you call the recognize() function for the first time.

Examples#

Speaking text in different languages:

import speech
import time

def finish_speaking():
    # Block until speech synthesis has finished
    while speech.is_speaking():
        time.sleep(0.1)

# US English:
speech.say('Hello World', 'en_US')
finish_speaking()
# Spanish:
speech.say('Hola mundo', 'es_ES')
finish_speaking()
# German:
speech.say('Hallo Welt', 'de_DE')
finish_speaking()

Recognizing spoken text recorded from the microphone (using sound.Recorder):

import speech
import sound
import dialogs

# Record an audio file using sound.Recorder:
recorder = sound.Recorder('speech.m4a')
recorder.record()
# Continue recording until the 'Finish' button is tapped:
dialogs.alert('Recording...', '', 'Finish', hide_cancel_button=True)
recorder.stop()
try:
    result = speech.recognize('speech.m4a')
    print('=== Details ===')
    print(result)
    print('=== Transcription ===')
    print(result[0][0])
except RuntimeError as e:
    print('Speech recognition failed: %s' % (e,))

Functions#

speech.get_synthesis_languages()#: Return a list of all language/locale identifiers that are available for speech synthesis. This is useful to determine valid language parameters for the say() function.

speech.get_recognition_languages()#: Return a list of all language/locale identifiers that are available for speech recognition. This is useful to determine valid language parameters for the recognize() function.

speech.say(text[, language, rate])#

Speak the given text with one of the system’s text-to-speech voices. The language is given as a BCP-47 language and locale code, e.g. ‘en-US’. If no language is given, the system’s default is used.

The rate parameter specifies how fast the text is spoken. The value is between 0.0 (slowest) and 1.0 (fastest). The default is 0.5.

speech.stop()#: Stop any speech synthesis.

speech.is_speaking()#: Return True if the synthesizer is currently speaking, False otherwise.

speech.recognize(file_path[, language])#

Transcribe spoken text in the given audio file. The audio file should not be longer than approximately one minute. You can use the sound.Recorder class to record an audio file from the microphone.

The language parameter is optional, and should be a valid locale identifier (e.g. 'de-DE or en-US) – the current system language is used by default.

The return value is a list of possible transcriptions, ordered by likelihood (confidence).

Each transcription in the result list is a tuple containing two elements: 1. The full text as a unicode string, 2. Detailed information about the individual segments (e.g. timestamps, confidence levels etc.) as a list of dictionaries.

This function raises a RuntimeError if speech recognition fails. If the language parameter is invalid or not supported, a ValueError is raised instead, or an IOError if the audio file cannot be read.

speech — Text-to-Speech on iOS#

Examples#

Functions#

`speech` — Text-to-Speech on iOS#