Text-to-speech is a broad topic, but as far as Spokestack is concerned, there are two things your app has to handle: sending the input to be synthesized, and playing the resulting audio for your users. This guide will cover both.

Starting up

To synthesize speech in Spokestack, use the synthesize method. This small API is built similarly to the speech pipeline, but it operates independently.

TTS requires very little configuration. The only things needed are your Spokestack API client ID and secret.

await Spokestack.initialize(
  // Your Spokestack API key ID
  'f0bc990c-e9db-4a0c-a2b1-6a6395a3d97e',
  // Your Spokestack API key secret
  '5BD5483F573D691A15CFA493C1782F451D4BD666E39A9E7B2EBE287E6A72C6B6'
)

In this example, the credentials are set to public values that allow you to try Spokestack TTS without creating an account.

Create an account or sign in to get your own free API credentials and access to additional features!

Generating the audio

Generating a URL to an audio stream of a TTS synthesized voice is just a single method in Spokestack!

const url = await Spokestack.synthesize(
  'Here I am, a brain the size of a planet.'
)

Spokestack.synthesize() can also synthesize using other formats besides plain text (the default). This includes SpeechMarkdown and SSML. See the TTS concept guide for more information on providing SSML input.

The default voice is Spokestack’s free “demo-male” voice. Custom voices are available! Contact us to find out more.

Documentation for Spokestack.synthesize() and its arguments can be found in react-native-spokestack’s README.

Using the generated audio

What you do with the synthesis result (or failure) is up to you! The streaming URL is valid for 60 seconds, so you can save it for later or play it back immediately.

For simple and immediate playback, we also provide Spokestack.speak(), which takes the same arguments as Spokestack.synthesize() but plays the audio as soon as the speech is processed using the device’s current playback settings. For more complicated playback, we defer to other libraries dedicated to that feature. We’re fond of react-native-video, and have also used react-native-track-player. For either one, pass the URL directly as the source.