How do I synthesize with Acapela voices without SAPI4 or SAPI 5?

Last reviewed: 9/10/2008

HOW Article ID: H090815

The information in this article applies to:

  • SpeechKit 6

Summary

The ChantTTS support for Microsoft SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 enables your applications to synthesize with Acapela Multimedia voices.

With SpeechKit 6, you can synthesize directly with the Acapela speech API BabTTS eliminating the need to install SAPI 4 or SAPI 5 and the overhead involved with these speech APIs.

More Information

Acapela Multimedia voices support Microsoft SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 speech APIs. They also provide a native interface BabTTS that offers a lot of features not available in either SAPI.

In SpeechKit 6, ChantTTS now supports native BabTTS API access to Acapela voices. In addition to eliminating an SAPI overhead to synthesis requests, and taking advantage of Acapela and ChantTTS-specific features, you can set your license key with the CSPVoiceLicenseKey property.

For native BabTTS API access, the ChantTTS component attempts to load the API libraries from Acapela default installation C:\Program Files\Acapela Group\Acapela Multimedia directory. If the libraries fail to load, the ChantTTS component attempts to load the libraries from the current working directory.

To specify a directory location for the libraries, set the CNPEngineAPI and CSPEnginePath properties after instantiating the ChantTTS component object:


ChantTTS1.SetNumberProperty(CNPEngineAPI, CEBABTTS)
ChantTTS1.SetStringProperty(CSPEnginePath, "c:\\yourpath\\tothelibraries")      

Acapela Multimedia SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 interfaces automatically include the SAPI version number when enumerating as a SAPI voice. To select native BabTTS API access to Ryan, your application selects the voice name without the SAPI version as follows:


ChantTTS1.SetStringProperty(CSPEngine, "Ryan, HQ 22k, USEnglish, Acapela Multimedia")