jtts, jQuery plug-in

update: I've made a version that works for firefox, chrome and IE. not sure about other browsers. https://github.com/kylepwarren/say-that

someone said they were having problems running this locally. Will try to set up a demo on this post to make sure there are not cross-domain restrictions causing a problem or anything. It's hosted on a pretty responsive cloud server, so suspect it's not a latency issue. ...how to include js in a wordpress post... can I do this in html edit mode?

ok it works now:

click here j Query Example Text

Notes:

1. I ended up putting the "say-that.js" include in the wordpress header file - I feel like it may have worked simply in the post/htmlmode, but when it wasn't working it was an easy possible problem to fix..
2. When I click the "read this page" link in the right side bar, it still works - so I feel like google has NOT changed their TTS service. However the older plugin definitely had cross browser-issues, details in older information below.
3. the problem with the new plugin was indeed cross-domain issues. Circumvented with a jsonp call. I will try to get the Git-hub version updated as soon as possible - otherwise view source. Git hub updated
   

/*************** EVERYTHING BELOW HERE IS FOR THE OLDER VERSION SOME PEOPLE SAY THE GOOGLE TTS SERVICE [WHICH THIS OLDER VERSION IS DEPENDENT ON] NO LONGER WORKS ****************/

StockMarketMoose.com now has a text to speech widget on the right that will read any page. This was created with jPlayer and Google Translates tts web-service. I've had this idea for a while but was having trouble finding an flv player that would do all the things I needed:

• mp3 format
• no crossdomain restrictions
• detailed player events

Google's text to speech service has a 100 character limit so the text has to be chopped up and sequenced. This requires knowing when a clip finished. HTML object and embed tags don't offer these events/listeners. The HTML5 audio tag does have the listeners I need, but the cross-browser media format support is extremely bad. My particular need, mp3, is not supported in FireFox. So, negative on the audio tag.

I tried 2 of the most popular flv media players jwplayer, and flowplayer. Flowplayer almost got the job done, but has a problem with content urls that include parameters. Something to do with JSON parsing and ampersands. jwplayer has major crossdomain restrictions, which made using Google's tts service impossible.

I took another stab at it, and found jPlayer. Works great. I could definitely make some improvements in the transitions between 100 character chunks of text, but it's pretty good for now.

Update:

I have packaged it as a jQuery plug-in. jtts.zip download.

example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jtts/jquery-1.5.1.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jtts/jQuery.jPlayer.2.0.0/jquery.jplayer.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jtts/jtts.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#textToSpeak").jtts();
});
</script>
<div id='textToSpeak'> Hello Stock Market Moose </div>

The  jtts_getText() function could definitely use some work. Google's tts service rarely pronounces symbols like @, $, % correctly. Also sometimes it takes the liberty of interpreting words as abbreviations - no is often spoken "number".  Almost any kind of special character crashes it, like a long dash. This function takes care of some of the problems I've found, but there are definitely more to be fixed.

Example

pretty much only works in firefox right now. It will work in IE IF you show the player div(remove 'display:none;'), and you maybe also have to set flash to a higher priority than html(5 audio tag)[find at jplayer site]. I debugged this a while ago but forgot the exact workaround. It was pretty terrible and not worth releasing. Chrome has some issue, i forgot what I found out about that too.

since building this I found lots of other web services that return text to speech in audio formats. Most of the alternatives don't have the 100 character limit like google, but I didn't see any that had different language support, so google is in some ways more innovative.