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Hey fellow OpenTX users!

I've been procrastinating whilst writing up my thesis, at the end of finishing up a rather long Matlab script I thought wouldn't it be great to be able to use Matlab to generate and save SAPI5 voice packs for my favorite TX, the FrSky Taranis.

Starting off with an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of the text to be read, the directory structure and the file name, this was imported into Matlab 2010 x32 (yep, it is the 32bit version, I have only been able to find a x32 version of the dll required for this script to work, I simply don't have enough time to procrastinate long enough to write my own x64 version). Then set up a few variables and a small looping script to take the text, file name and directory, read out the text in your favourite voice flavour then save the files into a new folder.

The  script is as follows: 

% Set up the initial parameters

clear all;close all;

load('TaranisVoiceData.mat');
Fs   = 32000;
N     = 228;
R     = 2;
Voice = 3;
FileName = 2;
Directory = 1;
Speed = 0; %range goes from -5 to 5
Nbits = 16;

% Extract all words, file paths and file names

for R = 2:N
% the first one is a string
if R == 1
VoiceList{R-1,Voice} = cellstr(textdata(R,Voice)); % use this for cells that contain 'strings'
VoiceList{R-1,FileName} = cellstr(textdata(R,FileName)); 
VoiceList{R-1,Directory} = cellstr(textdata(R,Directory)); 
else
% the next 2 to 110 are numbers
if R >= 2
if R <= 110
VoiceList{R-1,Voice} = num2str(textdata{R,Voice}); % use this for cells that contain numbers
VoiceList{R-1,FileName} = num2str(textdata{R,FileName}); 
VoiceList{R-1,Directory} = num2str(textdata{R,Directory}); 
elseif R > 110
VoiceList{R-1,Voice} = num2str(textdata{R,Voice}); % use this for cells that contain numbers
VoiceList{R-1,FileName} = num2str(textdata{R,FileName}); 
VoiceList{R-1,Directory} = num2str(textdata{R,Directory}); 
end
end 
end
end

%% Now to convert the text into speech and save
Y=1;
for Y=1:N
if Y==227
break
end
VoiceTemp = VoiceList(Y,3);
w = tts(char(VoiceTemp),'VW Kate',Speed,Fs);

currentPath = pwd; % Get the current working directory
[~,~,~] = mkdir(strcat(currentPath,'\SOUNDS'),'EN'); % make a new directory to store the files in ../EN & ../EN/SYSTEM
[~,~,~] = mkdir(strcat(currentPath,'\SOUNDS\EN'),'SYSTEM'); % make a new directory to store the files in ../EN & ../EN/SYSTEM

currentPath = strcat(currentPath,'\',VoiceList{Y,Directory},'\',VoiceList{Y,FileName}); % get the full file path
SaveToHere = currentPath; % store full file path in temp variable
% Save the file
wavwrite(w,Fs,Nbits,currentPath);
Y %counter to monitor progress
end

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The files are available here:

TaranisVoiceData.mat                     <- The data file which contains the filenames, paths and spoken text

taranis_voiceGen.m                         <- The Matlab file (REQ x32 version of Matlab, I used R2010B) RUN THIS ONE

Taranis%20HQ%20SOUNDS.rar  <- The outputs from the script

tts.m                                                     <- The TTS conversion script (REQUIRED)

Thanks to Siyi Dend who wrote the initial TTS script used in this release.

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One last thing, to get a list of all the voices that you have available on your computer system just open up Matlab, open the working directory where you have saved the files downloaded from the section above, then in the console type in:

tts('','List'); 

Matlab will print out a list of all available voices on your PC. You can see in the script file I have used the 'VW Kate' SAPI5 voice pack, if you remove the 'VW Kate' and make it like this: 

w = tts(char(VoiceTemp),'',Speed,Fs);

the script will use the default terrible Microsoft Mike or Anna voice, which is rather deplorable, so jump online and Google free SAPI5 voices, there are plenty to be found. See the figure below for an example list.

So with all of that out of the way, I hope that this script may become of use to someone in the community.

Let me know if there are any bugs and I'll try to fix them when I get another opportunity to procrastinate =)

Cheers & happy flying,

L