Richard Lynch wrote:
If you can compile (or find it compiled) on the exact same OS, you can
probably upload the binary and then use 'exec' on your own program.
I've had some success doing this on a shared host.
You might also be able to convince the webhost to just install
Festival for you. It would take them about 5 minutes, at most...
They might be leery, of course, if they think it will be too
resource-intensive.
Perhaps lightly off-topic, I had to make a quick audio CAPTCHA to
complement a visual one for a web site. I was thinking of having a
server-side TTS system, but that just became too big a can of worms for
the size of the project. I also had the restriction that the hosting
service provider refused to install any machine-code executables or
compile any programs to be installed on their servers.
So instead I used a collection of 95 sound clips, each one being a
recording of an ASCII character spoken out loud, with the file named as
the 2-digit hex code of the respective character. All the PHP script
had to do was concatenate the audio data portion of the necessary files,
then create a new header and send the result as a single audio file to
the user-agent. Worked like a charm. (I should also mention the audio
clips were in IMA-ADPCM format, so a simple concatenation like that
didn't break anything.)
Let me put it this way:
There is unlikely to be anything with a better chance of suceeding in
this endeavor than Festival. :-)
If you build a really cool way for people to make their sites provide
text-to-speech capabilities that everybody wants, and all that's
needed is for webhosts to install your software and Festival, then
they're gonna install Festival, because their users will demand it.
In the short term, there almost-for-sure isn't any easy way to upload
some magic widget that will work cross-platform and do text-to-speech.
So you're going to have to create demand for your project, by making
it super cool.
Well, there _is_ the alternative of writing an entire TTS engine in
PHP... should you have the knowledge, inclination, processing speed,
and crazyness to attempt such a task. ;-)
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