Tap Rap - A Text to Speech Synthesizer You Can Play

We have built a new fun app using CMU's Language Technologies Institute Flite text to speech (TTS) synthesizer. Tap Rap lets you program and play synthetic speech sounds using a 4x4 array of touch pads. Each pad can be programmed independently. Type in one or more words or phonetic sounds, select a voice, pitch, rate, and variation. Be a TTS rapper. Send greetings, songs, or synthetic voice messages via SMS or email. Or just play around and have fun.

So, to start, here's a happy birthday message we built using Tap Rap...

How to Use It

Here's a bunch of pads programmed to sound like Mr. Roboto... Sometimes it is necessary to "tweak" the spelling of a word to get the correct TTS pronunciation.

Besides being able to set the pitch of the speech, what's cool about the app is the ability to play the pads like a musical instrument...

Finally, here's an example of how to build a sequence that can be played back and shared via SMS or email...

Tap Rap provides eight different pad sets that you can program. Changes are automatically saved. There are four basic voices, each can be shifted 3 octaves (e.g., K1-3).

Under certain conditions some voices may be distorted. Simply change the voice, pitch, rate, or variation to eliminate the distortion.