BBC BASIC Programmers' Reference

by Richard Russell, October 2008

The supplied example program SPEAK.BBC illustrates how you can use Windows' built-in speech synthesis capabilities to output speech to your PC's loudspeakers, but what if you want to create a sound file containing the speech? Fortunately the SAPI 5 speech system (typically available in Windows 2000, XP and Vista) supports this facility directly.

The code below outputs speech to a specified WAV file:

      INSTALL @lib$+"COMLIBA"

      ON ERROR ON ERROR OFF : PROC_comexit : PRINT 'REPORT$ : END
      ON CLOSE PROC_comexit : QUIT

      PROC_cominit
      file$ = "test.wav"
      speech$ = "This is a test file"

      voice% = FN_createobject("SAPI.SpVoice")
      filestream% = FN_createobject("SAPI.SpFileStream")
      PROC_callmethod(filestream%, "Open("""+file$+""",3,0)")
      PROC_putobject(voice%, "AudioOutputStream(O filestream%)")
      PROC_callmethod(voice%, "Speak("""+speech$+""",0)")
      PROC_callmethod(filestream%, "Close")
      PROC_releaseobject(filestream%)
      PROC_releaseobject(voice%)

      PROC_comexit

      SYS "PlaySound", file$, 0, &20001

Note that this code requires COMLIB (or COMLIBA) version 3.3 or later, as supplied with BBC BASIC for Windows version 5.90a.