Published on Mar 12, 2024
Hello everyone, welcome back to our YouTube channel! Today, we have an exciting tutorial lined up for you. We’ll be walking you through the process of creating a simple Text To Speech application using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By the end of this video, you’ll have a basic understanding of how to convert text into speech right in your web browser. So, let’s dive in!
The first thing you’ll need to do is create an HTML file. Open up your favorite text editor and let’s get started.
Inside your HTML file, we have the basic structure set up. We have a header that says “Text To Speech”, a form with two input fields, one for entering text and the other for selecting the voice, and a button to convert text to speech.
Now, let’s move on to styling our HTML elements using CSS. We want our application to look neat and user-friendly, so let’s add some styles to make it visually appealing.
I’ve already prepared a CSS file called “style.css” where I’ve defined some basic styles for our elements. Feel free to customise it according to your preferences.
Next up, we need to add the functionality using JavaScript. We’ll be using the Web Speech API to convert our text into speech.
Inside our “script.js” file, we’ll write the JavaScript code to fetch the user input, select the desired voice, and convert the text to speech when the button is clicked.
Next, We’re going to dive into the CSS part of our Text To Speech application. We’ll be crafting a sleek and stylish frontend using CSS to enhance the user experience of our app.
Before we begin, let’s create a CSS file named “style.css” where we’ll be adding all our styling rules.
First things first, let’s style the wrapper that contains our application. We’ll give it some padding, border radius, and a subtle shadow to make it pop out on the screen. The background colour is set to a light gray to keep it clean and modern.
Next, we’ll style the header to make it stand out. We’ve chosen a larger font size, bold weight, and centred alignment to grab the viewer’s attention right away.
Moving on to the form, we’ll give it some margin to space it out from the header and add some margin at the bottom for a visually pleasing layout.
For the input fields, we’re using flexbox to arrange them vertically. We’ve removed any default styling such as borders and outlines, and we’ve set a uniform border radius for a consistent look.
The textarea where users input their text is given a specific height, and we’ve disabled the resize option to maintain its size. When focused, it gets a darker border color to indicate the active state.
We’ve styled the select dropdown to match the overall design aesthetic of our application. It has a custom scrollbar and a sleek appearance to make it blend seamlessly with the rest of the elements.
Finally, we’ve designed the convert button to be eye-catching yet minimalistic. It has a hover effect to provide feedback to the user when interacting with it.
In this part of our tutorial series, we’ll be delving into the JavaScript part of our Text To Speech application. We’ll be adding the functionality to convert text into speech using the Web Speech API.
Before we begin, let’s create a JavaScript file named “script.js” where we’ll be writing all our code.
We start by selecting the necessary elements from our HTML document using the document.querySelector() method. We grab the textarea, select dropdown, and the speech button.
We also initialise some variables including synth to hold the speech synthesis object and isSpeaking to keep track of whether speech is currently being played.
Next, we define a function called voices() to populate the select dropdown with available voices. We iterate through the list of voices provided by synth.getVoices() and create an option element for each voice.
We add an event listener for the voiceschanged event on the synth object. Whenever the available voices change, we call the voices() function to update the dropdown list.
We define a function called textToSpeech() which takes the text input and creates a new SpeechSynthesisUtterance object. We then loop through available voices and set the utterance’s voice to the selected voice from the dropdown.
Finally, we use synth.speak() to speak the text.
We add an event listener for the click event on the speech button. Inside the event handler, we first check if there is text in the textarea. If there is, we check if speech synthesis is not already speaking and if the text length is greater than 80 characters.
If so, we set an interval to check if speech is still speaking. We toggle between pausing and resuming speech based on the current state.
And there you have it! We’ve successfully added functionality to our Text To Speech application using JavaScript. Now, users can input text and have it converted into speech with the click of a button.
Stay tuned for the final part of this tutorial series, where we’ll put everything together and demonstrate the full functionality of our Text To Speech application.
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