Text-to-Speech in Emacs

Question

I\'m not blind, I just want to have a way to have my Windows machine read the contents of a buffer outloud. Here are the basic requirements:

• Read any English text

Answer 1

I have a simple solution based on the Python pyttsx module. This starts a python script as an emacs process and sends it strings to be read out.

(defvar tts nil "text to speech process")

(defun tts-up ()
  (interactive)
  (and (not (null tts))
       (eq (process-status tts) 'run)))

(defun tts-start ()
  (interactive)
  (if (not (tts-up))
      (setq tts
            (start-process "tts-python"
                           "*tts-python*"
                           "python" "speak.py"))))

(defun tts-end ()
  (interactive)
  (delete-process tts)
  (setq tts nil))

(defun tts-say (text)
  (interactive)
  (tts-start)
  (process-send-string tts (concat text "\n")))

The python file speak.py:

import pyttsx

engine = pyttsx.init()

def say(data):
    engine.say(data)
    engine.runAndWait()

while True:
    say(raw_input())