FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I am developing minetest for education.

In the past I have used "os.execute()" to do Text To Speech. It was suggested that this was a less that nice solution..... ahem

Obviously this doesn't work on servers and I am discovering I can't make it work on Android.

With this in mind I'm suggesting the lua command "player:speak_text(textToSpeak)" that invokes the client based synthesizer.

I am hanging this of the player object, as I feel it is effectively an extension of the player's hud. Do you agree?

I am currently prototyping this for Android successfully and would be able to implement this for Windows and MacOS.

What say you all about this being a good idea?

Well... Always that has good performance is ok!
If you try to implement a "Text2Speech" engine in Minetest then i don't know if the game can lag a bit...

I don't know how to send another type of packet to client...

EDIT: Actually, I forget what I want to say.

I was thinking of calling the platform specific TTS API, not compiling in another library.
I know how to do this for Android and Windows...not so sure about Linux though (other than shelling out to run the espeak commandline)

TTS would be great for mobs. NPC could start talking to the player, so this could be a very useful feature. Has any progress been made on this?

We are testing this in the "eidy" branch here:

https://github.com/dgt0011/minetest/tree/eidy

Currently it uses Android TTS (whatever engine is installed on the device) and the "espeak" commandline for Windows, Mac and Linux, which is a bit fiddly.

I would like to call the Windows/Mac APIs directly.

I'm not sure there is a speech API for Linux?