[sword-devel] PocketSword can speak!

[TS]

:)
I'm glad to see that I'm not alone in enjoying this type of feature. I 
actually have a story regarding this matter that I hope to write about 
later.

     How exactly are you triggering the TTS to work? There's two 
different methods that I know of at least. You can have the "Screen" 
read or you can select the text (or use the pop up menu to select all of 
the text) and then choose from the pop up menu "Speak".

     Strangely enough, even though the same voice is used both ways, the 
quality is not the same. The Screen reader version, for example, will 
pronounce the "L" in "LORD" as a separate word and then "ORD" as the 
following word whereas selecting the words themselves and having them 
spoken will not have that problem. The screen reading version also 
sounds more stilted.

     As far as I can tell, only one chapter at best will be read either 
way. This is, for me, is somewhat limiting as I would want the reading 
to continue going chapter after chapter. "And-bible" (the JSword based 
front-end which runs on Android) also has text to speech ability and 
it's pretty amazing on that app. The ability for the text to be read is 
integrated into its User Interface. So, it's very easy to see and use. I 
believe that it will also move on to the next chapter and continue 
reading out loud instead of stopping at the end of a chapter. It's a 
feature that I sorta wish that PocketSword had.

     Also, to emphasize something that you touched on, "English" is not 
the only "language" in which the text to speech works with on the 
iPhone. For example, if you use a Chinese Bible, it can read it out loud 
in Chinese. Or, if you select to use the Hebrew Aleppo Codex (Old 
Testament in Hebrew), you can also have it read the text out loud to you 
in Hebrew. (There's 3 dialects of Chinese available by default on the 
iPhone and one of Hebrew as of iOS 9.3.3.)

     There's a surprising variety of just "English" accent voices as 
well. "South Africa", for example, has its own "voice". My current 
settings list "Samantha" (enhanced) American accent as what I used last 
though it's been a while since I've used it. I think I've probably also 
tried out a little the British "Siri" female voice as well.

-TS

On 2/10/2017 3:43 AM, David Haslam wrote:
> After all these years of owning an iPad Mini & iPhone 5, I just found out
> that iOS devices do have TTS capability.
>
> So I just updated this section of our wiki page.
>
> https://crosswire.org/wiki/Choosing_a_SWORD_program#Other
>
> Quite a number of languages are supported when you select Voice.
> I've just installed the English (UK) voice called Daniel (Enhanced) 188 MB,
> but the default voice was quite acceptable.
>
> Of course, being quite general, you can't make it exclude the verse numbers
> in the selected passage.
>
> Best regards,
>
> David
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
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-- 
- Timothy