Multilingual Text-to-Speech (TTS) app for Twitch on macOS

Previously, I had built a text-to-speech app on Windows to help me listen to my Twitch chat while streaming. You can read about the project, why I built it, and download it here. This post is about the macOS version which I built on stream. If you're curious about my streams, follow me on Twitch @techygrrrl.

Screen Shot 2022-06-06 at 8.41.02 PM.png

Features

Multilingual

This text-to-speech app supports all languages that Apple supports by default.

Here's a snippet of code that shows which languages are supported:

.init(name: "Arabic", languageKey: "ar"),
.init(name: "Chinese", languageKey: "zh"),
.init(name: "Czech", languageKey: "cs"),
.init(name: "Danish", languageKey: "da"),
.init(name: "Dutch", languageKey: "nl"),
.init(name: "English", languageKey: "en"),
.init(name: "Finnish", languageKey: "fi"),
.init(name: "French", languageKey: "fr"),
.init(name: "German", languageKey: "de"),
.init(name: "Greek", languageKey: "el"),
.init(name: "Hebrew", languageKey: "he"),
.init(name: "Hindi", languageKey: "hi"),
.init(name: "Hungarian", languageKey: "hu"),
.init(name: "Indonesian", languageKey: "id"),
.init(name: "Italian", languageKey: "it"),
.init(name: "Japanese", languageKey: "ja"),
.init(name: "Korean", languageKey: "ko"),
.init(name: "Norwegian", languageKey: "nb"),
.init(name: "Polish", languageKey: "pl"),
.init(name: "Portuguese", languageKey: "pt"),
.init(name: "Romanian", languageKey: "ro"),
.init(name: "Russian", languageKey: "ru"),
.init(name: "Slovak", languageKey: "sk"),
.init(name: "Spanish", languageKey: "es"),
.init(name: "Swedish", languageKey: "sv"),
.init(name: "Thai", languageKey: "th"),
.init(name: "Turkish", languageKey: "tr")

Support depends on the macOS version and installed voices. At time of development, on macOS 11, the above languages are supported. Please note that not all of them have been tested.

Screen Shot 2022-06-06 at 8.39.52 PM.png

Speed, Volume and Stop Controls

You are able to configure the speed and volume controls on the Listen screen. The recommended speed is 0.5.

You can also stop the app from speaking if it's in the middle of speaking. Note that any already-queued up messages will not be spoken. Once another person sends a message after it's been stopped, they will continue to be read aloud. To stop it entirely, quit the app or lower the volume to 0%.

Screen Shot 2022-06-06 at 8.38.58 PM.png

Noise reduction features

The app includes features to reduce noise from official Twitch emotes. BTTV emotes and unicode emojis not currently supported so they will be read aloud.

Word Replacements

This app has the ability to replace words in text, just like the Windows version I built. It runs on the message text and the username.

This can be useful for the following reasons:

expand internet slang / short forms
override username pronunciation

Screen Shot 2022-06-06 at 8.39.07 PM.png

Ignore List

This app adds the ability to ignore usernames. This is useful if you do not want to hear your bots' messages being read aloud.

Screen Shot 2022-06-06 at 8.39.31 PM.png

Download and Install (soon 🤞)

Once I pay for an Apple developer account ($100/yr) to sign and distribute the app, it will become available. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow developers to distribute an app without paying the annual fee. If you need access to a text-to-speech app and have a Windows computer, you can download and install the Windows version. It's available now and is free.

Watch me build it

I built this in 7 streams. Streams ranged from 5 to 9 hours long. It was an epic journey learning SwiftUI and the text-to-speech API's on macOS.

You can watch my journey learning SwiftUI and macOS development on Twitch in the following video collection: https://www.twitch.tv/collections/-9v-a8uO8RbfCA

You can also see individual videos:

This is what it looked like on day 1 before the stream started:

Multilingual Text-to-Speech (TTS) app for Twitch on macOS

Comments

More from this blog

I made a video editor with mediabunny, a library that AI thinks doesn't exist

Multi-language Text-to-Speech (TTS) app built with web technologies

sf6vid: a CLI tool to hide usernames in game play, written in Go

Dark mode for the Twitch Dev docs

Use light mode chat in Twitch Theatre Mode