"Talkie" text-to-speech for ESP-32

bobolink
Posts: 98
Joined: Mon Feb 26, 2018 4:17 pm

"Talkie" text-to-speech for ESP-32

Postby bobolink » Thu May 10, 2018 9:14 pm

Arduino “Talkie” text-to-speech sketch (LPC-10 codec) converted to ESP32 Arduino-IDE
https://github.com/bobh/ESP32Talkie

Stores speech in much smaller files than .wav format. Has a phrase library

Copy file “ESP32Talkie-master” to /Arduino/libraries/
Start Arduino-IDE File/Examples/Examples From Custom Libraries/Talkie

Connect an audio amplifier to ESP32’s GPIO 25 for example
https://github.com/bobh/ESP32AudioFrame ... iagram.pdf
Also, other signal generator examples for that setup https://github.com/bobh/ESP32AudioFramework

Warning: If you play that Suzanne Vega song, it will be in your head for the rest of the day. :evil:

bobolink
Posts: 98
Joined: Mon Feb 26, 2018 4:17 pm

Re: "Talkie" text-to-speech for ESP-32

Postby bobolink » Sat May 12, 2018 9:04 pm

I converted the “Talkie” Library without knowing much about it. Someone in the General Discussion section of this forum asked for help in getting it to work on the ESP-32.

But I researched the project today and it has a whole story. It emulates the Texas Instruments TMS5220 chip which was used in their Speak and Spell product from the 1980’s. It became famous in the Spielberg movie “ET the Extra-Terrestrial” where ET used a hacked Speak & Spell toy to talk to Drew Barrymore and others. Also, it is the technology Atari Games used for their speech processing
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/260857 ... 5220-tool/

In the above link, the poster references a Mac program he wrote to convert wave files to a compatible compressed eight-bit binary stream (and can you replace the Suzanne Vega song with that stream). I played around with it and got marginal results but there are lots of things to tweak.

Some notes:
The above Xcode project uses cocoa pods. With Pods, remember to open the Workspace and not the project.
Record your message in Audacity from the built in mic:
1 Mono Recording Channel, Project Rate (Hz) 8000
Export as wav — Wav Microsoft signed 16-bit PCM

Import into the BlueWizard Xcode app you built and process. Have the check mark for “0x” prefix set so the output is in Arduino array format. Export as a text file which you copy and paste over Ms. Vega’s effort.

I should spend some time bringing back compatibility with the other Arduinos but the changes for ESP32 were significant and I can’t test with the other hardware.

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