mscstts Package:

The goal of mscstts is to provide an R Client for the Microsoft Cognitive Services Text to Speech REST API, including voice synthesis. A valid account MUST be registered at the Microsoft Cognitive Services website https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/ in order to obtain a (free) API key. Without an API key, this package will not work properly.

See the documentation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech/home

Getting an API key

You can get a TTS API key here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/try/cognitive-services/. The API you need to get one from is Bing Speech. (This will be deprecated! See below)

1. Create an Azure account
2. Go to https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.CognitiveServicesSpeechServices. If that works, skip to step 5.
3. Go to https://portal.azure.com/#home
4. Click + Create a Resource
5. Search “Speech”
6. Hit + Create
7. Should be able to create an F0 account (which is free - see below) if you hit the pricing tiers

Installation

You can install mscstts from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("muschellij2/mscstts")

Example

library(mscstts)
if (ms_have_tts_key()) {
  res = ms_synthesize(
    script = "hey, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good",
    output_format = "audio-16khz-128kbitrate-mono-mp3")
  tmp <- tempfile("example", fileext = ".mp3")
  writeBin(res$content, con = tmp)
  mp3 = tuneR::readMP3(tmp)
}
testthat::expect_true(file.size(tmp) > 50000)
if (interactive()) {
  tuneR::play(mp3, player = "play")
}