Experimenting with a new API via Cloudflare workers.
TL; DR Recently reinvigorated with my new UI work, I set myself to task with simplifying the front end player code. No matter how I looked at it, I’d needed to rewrite the back end API to support a front end rewrite. But what if I didn’t precisely need to do that? Enter stage left, Cloudflare Workers.
Below I explain how I arrived at this. If you would like to view the Worker code, you can do so here.
I revisit the UI, hoping to improve the general experience.
TL; DR My previous user interface (UI) could be, at best described as functional. Whilst it technically worked on any platform I tested, a desktop browser received the best experience. Recently @suivethefirst recommended Bootstrap to me. So I tried to make a better experience with this.
Putting the minimum into MVP Putting together the UI as it stood was the last functional step in my project. Delivering an audio player with a combination of CSS and JavaScript felt beyond what I had in the tank at the time.
Using AWS components, Cloudflare, and public APIs.
TL; DR In this post, I revisit my serverless “jokes and quotes” player. The purpose was to remove the tight coupling between the client request and audio playback API source. To explore the issue, I have introduced DynamoDB to store pre-generated results.
Challenge overview Logically, all the components of my existing solution depend on each other to succeed to deliver audio to the client. You can visualise it as follows:
Using AWS components, Cloudflare, and public APIs.
TL; DR I decided to dust off my text-to-speech list, implementing a serverless solution delivering random jokes and quotes. You may visit it at this address:
https://tts-ja.mesmontgomery.co.uk/
You can get a preview of the joke quality here:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Note: I can’t affect the humour quality 🤣.
Solution overview Upon visiting the page, an event triggers calls to the API routes for their relative jokes and quotes.
Introducing a pool of voices and choices in rate of speech, pitch and volume gain.
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:
A guide for using PowerShell with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API.
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.
Check out the projects I'm working on, and the progress along the way!
