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Talk to Me! Using Java Speech to Make Programs Talk

Adding speech capabilities to your applications can not only make them more interesting but can also make them more accessible to the vision-impaired. The Java Speech API (JSAPI) is a standard extension to Java, with features for speech synthesis as well as speech recognition. As with most other standard extensions to Java, you can plug in different implementations, and a number of speech engines are available. We will be using FreeTTS, an open-source speech engine. To use FreeTTS, you must first set up the JSAPI environment according to the documentation. This involves agreeing to Sun's ...