Mini-Project: Command line speech synth tool for Windows

The story behind this mini-project is, a friend of mine mentioned how he would SSH into his Mac at home and use “say” to send a short message to his parents, just like in a past XKCD webcomic:

Mac users, lucky you. You get a Terminal utility called “say” that converts text to speech. Windows doesn’t come with this tool, so I thought, it couldn’t be that difficult to make my own command line speech synth tool for Windows.

After a bit of research, I found that it’s really quite easy to make thanks to the Speech libraries in the .NET framework. Yep – no more than 30 lines of spaced out C# code:

using System;
using System.Speech.Synthesis;
 
namespace speech
{
    class say
    {
        static SpeechSynthesizer synth = new SpeechSynthesizer();
 
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length == 0)
            {
                InteractiveMode();
                return;
            }
 
            synth.Speak(string.Join(" ", args));
        }
 
        static void InteractiveMode()
        {
            string line;
            while ((line = Console.ReadLine()) != null)
            {
                synth.Speak(line);
            }
        }
    }
}

This application can either take its input as command line arguments, or from standard input if it is started without any arguments.

For example:

say.exe foo
(computer says “foo”)
say.exe foo bar
(computer says “foo bar”)
say.exe “foo bar”
(computer says “foo bar”)
say.exe
(computer waits for further input)
foo bar
(computer says “foo bar” then waits for further input)
CTRL+Z then ENTER exits the application

Source code: Speech Synthesiser VS10 Project (.zip, 38KB)
Binary file: say.exe (.exe, 7KB) requires .NET Client Profile 4.0

Enjoy!