TTS project update 1 - adding texture to my generated speech

Introducing a pool of voices and choices in rate of speech, pitch and volume gain.

2 minute read

TL; DR In this post, I’d like to share an update on work to address some of the limitations in my text to speech project for Elite Dangerous.. Namely: Single voice is used for the synthesis; and Pitch, tone and emphasis are unchanged from defaults. If you’d like to see the result of the work so far, here is a brief overview video, I’ll describe how we got here below:

Google Firebase with a side of AWS Amplify

Dual hosting a Hugo static site with two of the largest CDNs in the world.

4 minute read

TL; DR In this post, I’ll discuss a rabbit hole that I went down with only a thin excuse as the reason. And here it is, a Reddit reply to a shared post from this site: I can’t view on my desktop because your site is blocked on my network. Sorry The rabbit hole in question? Dual stacking this site across Google and Amazon infrastructure. Introducing AWS Amplify I first read about Amplify in this blog post.

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech with PowerShell

A guide for using PowerShell with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API.

6 minute read

TL; DR In this post, I’ll walk through the basics of using PowerShell to interact with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API. Partly a documentation exercise and somewhat a guide I’d like to have been able to read when I started on my Elite Dangerous Google Cloud Text-to-Speech project. As such, we’ll start with a basic script to produce an audio file and explain how that works. Later I’ll walk through some parameters of interest to affect the response.

How to base64 decode on Windows 10 without base64.exe

Converting the base64 audio content response from the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API into a playable file on windows using PowerShell.

2 minute read

TL;DR You can call certutil from PowerShell to produce the required file. Introduction There is a moment in life where you get stuck in a quick start guide - we’ve all been there. At the start of my Google Cloud text-to-speech project it arrived quickly and unexpectedly at step two of this two-step quick start guide. I had successfully returned my first base64 encoded speech audio, onward to the last step: