Commands

speak

Supported By

Syntax

speak phrase [with gender voice|with voice voice]

Phrase and voice yield strings. Gender is male, female, or neuter.

Description

The speak command speaks the specified phrase using a text-to-speech synthesizer. If the voice is specified, the phrase will be read using the specified voice. Otherwise, the default voice is used.

Notes

The speak command is asynchronous: it will return immediately while the speech keeps playing in the background. If there is already text being spoken, the next text to be spoken will be added to a queue. The stop speech command will stop all current and pending speech.

HyperTalk and OpenXION running under Mac OS use the speech synthesizer built in to Mac OS. OpenXION running under other platforms will use JSAPI (Java Speech API), if available. If JSAPI is not available, speak will do nothing but set the result to an error message.

See Also

stop, speech, voice, voices