Hark is a text to speech app I built in 3 hours based on the new AVSpeechSynthesizer SDK in iOS 7.
I first learned about this SDK from Mattt Thompson's great NSHipster blog post about iOS 7.
Check out this video showing how the app works and why I built it.
This app will be available on the App Store for free and I'm releasing the source as an example for other developers to encourage you to put text to speech in your apps!
Here are some features you might want to borrow for your apps:
UIMenuItemto read the currently selected text- Language voice detection
- Read the entire document or the selected text
- Detect new text in the clipboard
- Starting and stopping the reading. For simplicity I didn't add pausing but you might want to.
#Todo
- Improved app communication, probably via url schemes
- Buttons to dismiss the keyboard and clear the text view, probably above the keyboard
- Settings for reading speed and voice selection
Be sure to follow me on twitter!
Thanks to Eric Wolfe for his awesome language voice detection pull request!
Special thanks to Mattt Thompson for bringing AVSpeechSynthesizer to my attention, Drew Wilson for the Execute book and mentality, and Sam Soffes for convincing me to open source this project!