While trying to determine a solution to How to use Web Speech API at chromium? found that
var voices = window.speechSynthesis.getVoices();
returns an empty array for voices identifier.
Not certain if lack of support at chromium browser is related to this issue Not OK, Google: Chromium voice extension pulled after spying concerns?
Questions:
1) Are there any workarounds which can implement the requirement of creating or converting audio from text at chromium browser?
2) How can we, the developer community, create an open source database of audio files reflecting both common and uncommon words; served with appropriate CORS headers?
There are several possible workarounds that have found which provide the ability to create audio from text; two of which require requesting an external resource, the other uses meSpeak.js by #masswerk.
Using approach described at Download the Audio Pronunciation of Words from Google, which suffers from not being able to pre-determine which words actually exist as a file at the resource without writing a shell script or performing a HEAD request to check if a network error occurs. For example, the word "do" is not available at the resource used below.
window.addEventListener("load", () => {
const textarea = document.querySelector("textarea");
const audio = document.createElement("audio");
const mimecodec = "audio/webm; codecs=opus";
audio.controls = "controls";
document.body.appendChild(audio);
audio.addEventListener("canplay", e => {
audio.play();
});
let words = textarea.value.trim().match(/\w+/g);
const url = "https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/de/0/";
const mediatype = ".mp3";
Promise.all(
words.map(word =>
fetch(`https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select * from data.uri where url="${url}${word}${mediatype}"&format=json&callback=`)
.then(response => response.json())
.then(({query: {results: {url}}}) =>
fetch(url).then(response => response.blob())
.then(blob => blob)
)
)
)
.then(blobs => {
// const a = document.createElement("a");
audio.src = URL.createObjectURL(new Blob(blobs, {
type: mimecodec
}));
// a.download = words.join("-") + ".webm";
// a.click()
})
.catch(err => console.log(err));
});
<textarea>what it does my ninja?</textarea>
Resources at Wikimedia Commons Category:Public domain are not necessary served from same directory, see How to retrieve Wiktionary word content?, wikionary API - meaning of words.
If the precise location of the resource is known, the audio can be requested, though the URL may include prefixes other than the word itself.
fetch("https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/En-uk-hello-1.ogg")
.then(response => response.blob())
.then(blob => new Audio(URL.createObjectURL(blob)).play());
Not entirely sure how to use the Wikipedia API, How to get Wikipedia content using Wikipedia's API?, Is there a clean wikipedia API just for retrieve content summary? to get only the audio file. The JSON response would need to be parsed for text ending in .ogg, then a second request would need to be made for the resource itself.
fetch("https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=parse&format=json&prop=text&callback=?&page=hello")
.then(response => response.text())
.then(data => {
new Audio(location.protocol + data.match(/\/\/upload\.wikimedia\.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/[\d-/]+[\w-]+\.ogg/).pop()).play()
})
// "//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/En-us-hello.ogg\"
which logs
Fetch API cannot load https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=parse&format=json&prop=text&callback=?&page=hello. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource
when not requested from same origin. We would need to try to use YQL again, though not certain how to formulate the query to avoid errors.
The third approach uses a slightly modified version of meSpeak.js to generate the audio without making an external request. The modification was to create a proper callback for .loadConfig() method
fetch("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/guest271314/f48ee0658bc9b948766c67126ba9104c/raw/958dd72d317a6087df6b7297d4fee91173e0844d/mespeak.js")
.then(response => response.text())
.then(text => {
const script = document.createElement("script");
script.textContent = text;
document.body.appendChild(script);
return Promise.all([
new Promise(resolve => {
meSpeak.loadConfig("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/guest271314/8421b50dfa0e5e7e5012da132567776a/raw/501fece4fd1fbb4e73f3f0dc133b64be86dae068/mespeak_config.json", resolve)
}),
new Promise(resolve => {
meSpeak.loadVoice("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/guest271314/fa0650d0e0159ac96b21beaf60766bcc/raw/82414d646a7a7ef11bb04ddffe4091f78ef121d3/en.json", resolve)
})
])
})
.then(() => {
// takes approximately 14 seconds to get here
console.log(meSpeak.isConfigLoaded());
meSpeak.speak("what it do my ninja", {
amplitude: 100,
pitch: 5,
speed: 150,
wordgap: 1,
variant: "m7"
});
})
.catch(err => console.log(err));
one caveat of the above approach being that it takes approximately 14 and a half seconds for the three files to load before the audio is played back. However, avoids external requests.
It would be a positive to either or both 1) create a FOSS, developer maintained database or directory of sounds for both common and uncommon words; 2) perform further development of meSpeak.js to reduce load time of the three necessary files; and use Promise based approaches to provide notifications of the progress of of the loading of the files and readiness of the application.
In this users' estimation, it would be a useful resource if developers themselves created and contributed to an online database of files which responded with an audio file of the specific word. Not entirely sure if github is the appropriate venue to host audio files? Will have to consider the possible options if interest in such a project is shown.
Related
I have a language site that I am working on to teach language. Users can click on objects and hear the audio for what they click on. Many of the people that will be using this are in more remote areas with slower Internet connections. Because of this, I am needing to cache audio before each of the activities is loaded otherwise there is too much of a delay.
Previously, I was having an issue where preloading would not work because iOS devices do not allow audio to load without a click event. I have gotten around this, however, I now have another issue. iOS/Safari only allows the most recent audio file to be loaded. Therefore, whenever the user clicks on another audio file (even if it was clicked on previously), it is not cached and the browser has to download it again.
So far I have not found an adequate solution to this. There are many posts from around 2011~2012 that try to deal with this but I have not found a good solution. One solution was to combine all audio clips for activity into a single audio file. That way only one audio file would be loaded into memory for each activity and then you just pick a particular part of the audio file to play. While this may work, it also becomes a nuisance whenever an audio clip needs to be changed, added, or removed.
I need something that works well in a ReactJS/Redux environment and caches properly on iOS devices.
Is there a 2020 solution that works well?
You can use IndexedDB. It's a low-level API for client-side storage of significant amounts of structured data, including files/blobs. IndexedDB API is powerful, but may seem too complicated for simple cases. If you'd prefer a simple API, try libraries such as localForage, dexie.js.
localForage is A Polyfill providing a simple name:value syntax for client-side data storage, which uses IndexedDB in the background, but falls back to WebSQL and then localStorage in browsers that don't support IndexedDB.
You can check the browser support for IndexedDB here: https://caniuse.com/#search=IndexedDB. It's well supported. Here is a simple example I made to show the concept:
index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Audio</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Audio</h1>
<div id="container"></div>
<script src="localForage.js"></script>
<script src="main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
main.js
"use strict";
(function() {
localforage.setItem("test", "working");
// create HTML5 audio player
function createAudioPlayer(audio) {
const audioEl = document.createElement("audio");
const audioSrc = document.createElement("source");
const container = document.getElementById("container");
audioEl.controls = true;
audioSrc.type = audio.type;
audioSrc.src = URL.createObjectURL(audio);
container.append(audioEl);
audioEl.append(audioSrc);
}
window.addEventListener("load", e => {
console.log("page loaded");
// get the audio from indexedDB
localforage.getItem("audio").then(audio => {
// it may be null if it doesn't exist
if (audio) {
console.log("audio exist");
createAudioPlayer(audio);
} else {
console.log("audio doesn't exist");
// fetch local audio file from my disk
fetch("panumoon_-_sidebyside_2.mp3")
// convert it to blob
.then(res => res.blob())
.then(audio => {
// save the blob to indexedDB
localforage
.setItem("audio", audio)
// create HTML5 audio player
.then(audio => createAudioPlayer(audio));
});
}
});
});
})();
localForage.js just includes the code from here: https://github.com/localForage/localForage/blob/master/dist/localforage.js
You can check IndexedDB in chrome dev tools and you will find our items there:
and if you refresh the page you will still see it there and you will see the audio player created as well. I hope this answered your question.
BTW, older versions of safari IOS didn't support storing blob in IndexedDB if it's still the case you can store the audio files as ArrayBuffer which is very well supported. Here is an example using ArrayBuffer:
main.js
"use strict";
(function() {
localforage.setItem("test", "working");
// convert arrayBuffer to Blob
function arrayBufferToBlob(buffer, type) {
return new Blob([buffer], { type: type });
}
// convert Blob to arrayBuffer
function blobToArrayBuffer(blob) {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
const reader = new FileReader();
reader.addEventListener("loadend", e => {
resolve(reader.result);
});
reader.addEventListener("error", reject);
reader.readAsArrayBuffer(blob);
});
}
// create HTML5 audio player
function createAudioPlayer(audio) {
// if it's a buffer
if (audio.buffer) {
// convert it to blob
audio = arrayBufferToBlob(audio.buffer, audio.type);
}
const audioEl = document.createElement("audio");
const audioSrc = document.createElement("source");
const container = document.getElementById("container");
audioEl.controls = true;
audioSrc.type = audio.type;
audioSrc.src = URL.createObjectURL(audio);
container.append(audioEl);
audioEl.append(audioSrc);
}
window.addEventListener("load", e => {
console.log("page loaded");
// get the audio from indexedDB
localforage.getItem("audio").then(audio => {
// it may be null if it doesn't exist
if (audio) {
console.log("audio exist");
createAudioPlayer(audio);
} else {
console.log("audio doesn't exist");
// fetch local audio file from my disk
fetch("panumoon_-_sidebyside_2.mp3")
// convert it to blob
.then(res => res.blob())
.then(blob => {
const type = blob.type;
blobToArrayBuffer(blob).then(buffer => {
// save the buffer and type to indexedDB
// the type is needed to convet the buffer back to blob
localforage
.setItem("audio", { buffer, type })
// create HTML5 audio player
.then(audio => createAudioPlayer(audio));
});
});
}
});
});
})();
Moving my answer here from the comment.
You can use HTML5 localstorage API to store/cache the audio content. See this article from Apple https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/SafariJSDatabaseGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html.
As per the article,
Make your website more responsive by caching resources—including audio
and video media—so they aren't reloaded from the web server each time
a user visits your site.
There is an example to show how to use the storage.
Apple also allows you to use a database if you need so. See this example: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/SafariJSDatabaseGuide/ASimpleExample/ASimpleExample.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007256-CH4-SW4
Lets explore some browser storage options
localStorage is only good for storing short key/val string
IndexedDB is not ergonomic for it design
websql is deprecated/removed
Native file system is a good canditate but still experimental behind a flag in chrome
localForge is a just booiler lib for a key/value storage wrapped around IndexedDB and promises (good but unnecessary)
That leaves us with: Cache storage
/**
* Returns the cached url if it exist or fetches it,
* stores it and returns a blob
*
* #param {string|Request} url
* #returns {Promise<Blob>}
*/
async function cacheFirst (url) {
const cache = await caches.open('cache')
const res = await cache.match(file) || await fetch(url).then(res => {
cache.put(url, res.clone())
return res
})
return res.blob()
}
cacheFirst(url).then(blob => {
audioElm.src = URL.createObjectURL(blob)
})
Cache storage goes well hand in hand with service worker but can function without it. doe your site needs to be secure, as it's a "power function" and only exist in secure contexts.
Service worker is a grate addition if you want to build PWA (Progressive web app) with offline support, maybe you should consider it. something that can help you on the way is: workbox it can cache stuff on the fly as you need them - like some man in the middle. it also have a cache first strategy.
Then it can be as simple as just writing <audio src="url"> and let workbox do it thing
I am using web-share level 2 for my PWA app. Every media format is working fine except PDF. Web api is returning base64 string of PDF, At client side, I am creating blob object from it. but when I share it, Throws exception : Permission Denied
var file = new File(["/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD...."], 'filename.pdf', { type: 'application/pdf' });
var filesArray = [];
filesArray.push(file);
navigator['share']({files: filesArray})
.then(() => console.log('Share was successful.'))
.catch((error) => console.log('Sharing failed', error));
I don't have any clue whats going on.
For others who might encounter this problem, this was discussed on https://github.com/w3c/web-share/issues/141 and is a current limitation in Chrome tracked in https://crbug.com/1006055
I was wondering if it was possible to stream data from javascript to the browser's downloads manager.
Using webrtc, I stream data (from files > 1Gb) from a browser to the other. On the receiver side, I store into memory all this data (as arraybuffer ... so the data is essentially still chunks), and I would like the user to be able to download it.
Problem : Blob objects have a maximum size of about 600 Mb (depending on the browser) so I can't re-create the file from the chunks. Is there a way to stream these chunks so that the browser downloads them directly ?
if you want to fetch a large file blob from an api or url, you can use streamsaver.
npm install streamsaver
then you can do something like this
import { createWriteStream } from 'streamsaver';
export const downloadFile = (url, fileName) => {
return fetch(url).then(res => {
const fileStream = createWriteStream(fileName);
const writer = fileStream.getWriter();
if (res.body.pipeTo) {
writer.releaseLock();
return res.body.pipeTo(fileStream);
}
const reader = res.body.getReader();
const pump = () =>
reader
.read()
.then(({ value, done }) => (done ? writer.close() : writer.write(value).then(pump)));
return pump();
});
};
and you can use it like this:
const url = "http://urltobigfile";
const fileName = "bigfile.zip";
downloadFile(url, fileName).then(() => { alert('done'); });
Following #guest271314's advice, I added StreamSaver.js to my project, and I successfully received files bigger than 1GB on Chrome. According to the documentation, it should work for files up to 15GB but my browser crashed before that (maximum file size was about 4GB for me).
Note I: to avoid the Blob max size limitation, I also tried to manually append data to the href field of a <a></a> but it failed with files of about 600MB ...
Note II: as amazing as it might seem, the basic technique using createObjectURL works perfectly fine on Firefox for files up to 4GB !!
I want to download an encrypted file from my server, decrypt it and save it locally. I want to decrypt the file and write it locally as it is being downloaded rather than waiting for the download to finish, decrypting it and then putting the decrypted file in an anchor tag. The main reason I want to do this is so that with large files the browser does not have to store hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes in memory.
This is only going to be possible with a combination of service worker + fetch + stream
A few browser has worker and fetch but even fewer support fetch with streaming (Blink)
new Response(new ReadableStream({...}))
I have built a streaming file saver lib to communicate with a service worker in other to intercept network request: StreamSaver.js
It's a little bit different from node's stream here is an example
function unencrypt(){
// should return Uint8Array
return new Uint8Array()
}
// We use fetch instead of xhr that has streaming support
fetch(url).then(res => {
// create a writable stream + intercept a network response
const fileStream = streamSaver.createWriteStream('filename.txt')
const writer = fileStream.getWriter()
// stream the response
const reader = res.body.getReader()
const pump = () => reader.read()
.then(({ value, done }) => {
let chunk = unencrypt(value)
// Write one chunk, then get the next one
writer.write(chunk) // returns a promise
// While the write stream can handle the watermark,
// read more data
return writer.ready.then(pump)
)
// Start the reader
pump().then(() =>
console.log('Closed the stream, Done writing')
)
})
There are also two other way you can get streaming response with xhr, but it's not standard and doesn't mather if you use them (responseType = ms-stream || moz-chunked-arrayBuffer) cuz StreamSaver depends on fetch + ReadableStream any ways and can't be used in any other way
Later you will be able to do something like this when WritableStream + Transform streams gets implemented as well
fetch(url).then(res => {
const fileStream = streamSaver.createWriteStream('filename.txt')
res.body
.pipeThrogh(unencrypt)
.pipeTo(fileStream)
.then(done)
})
It's also worth mentioning that the default download manager is commonly associated with background download so ppl sometimes close the tab when they see the download. But this is all happening in the main thread so you need to warn the user when they leave
window.onbeforeunload = function(e) {
if( download_is_done() ) return
var dialogText = 'Download is not finish, leaving the page will abort the download'
e.returnValue = dialogText
return dialogText
}
New solution has arrived: showSaveFilePicker/FileSystemWritableFileStream, supported in Chrome, Edge, and Opera since October 2020 (and with a ServiceWorker-based shim for Firefox—from the author of the other major answer!), will allow you to do this directly:
async function streamDownloadDecryptToDisk(url, DECRYPT) {
// create readable stream for ciphertext
let rs_src = fetch(url).then(response => response.body);
// create writable stream for file
let ws_dest = window.showSaveFilePicker().then(handle => handle.createWritable());
// create transform stream for decryption
let ts_dec = new TransformStream({
async transform(chunk, controller) {
controller.enqueue(await DECRYPT(chunk));
}
});
// stream cleartext to file
let rs_clear = rs_src.then(s => s.pipeThrough(ts_dec));
return (await rs_clear).pipeTo(await ws_dest);
}
Depending on performance—if you're trying to compete with MEGA, for instance—you might also consider modifying DECRYPT(chunk) to allow you to use ReadableStreamBYOBReader with it:
…zero-copy reading from an underlying byte source. It is used for efficient copying from underlying sources where the data is delivered as an "anonymous" sequence of bytes, such as files.
For security reasons, browsers do not allow piping an incoming readable stream directly to the local file system, so you have two ways to solve it:
window.open(Resource_URL): download the resource in a new window with
Content_Disposition set to "attachment";
<a download href="path/to/resource"></a>: using the "download" attribute of
AnchorElement to download stream into the hard disk;
hope these helps :)
Is it possible to use W3C Web Speech API to write Javascript code which generates audio file (wav, ogg or mp3) with voice speaking given text? I mean, I want to do something like:
window.speechSynthesis.speak(new SpeechSynthesisUtterance("0 1 2 3"))
but I want sound generated with it not to be output to speakers but to file.
The requirement is not possible using Web Speech API alone, see Re: MediaStream, ArrayBuffer, Blob audio result from speak() for recording?, How to implement option to return Blob, ArrayBuffer, or AudioBuffer from window.speechSynthesis.speak() call
Though requirement is possible using a library, for example, espeak or meSpeak, see How to create or convert text to audio at chromium browser?.
fetch("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/guest271314/f48ee0658bc9b948766c67126ba9104c/raw/958dd72d317a6087df6b7297d4fee91173e0844d/mespeak.js")
.then(response => response.text())
.then(text => {
const script = document.createElement("script");
script.textContent = text;
document.body.appendChild(script);
return Promise.all([
new Promise(resolve => {
meSpeak.loadConfig("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/guest271314/8421b50dfa0e5e7e5012da132567776a/raw/501fece4fd1fbb4e73f3f0dc133b64be86dae068/mespeak_config.json", resolve)
}),
new Promise(resolve => {
meSpeak.loadVoice("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/guest271314/fa0650d0e0159ac96b21beaf60766bcc/raw/82414d646a7a7ef11bb04ddffe4091f78ef121d3/en.json", resolve)
})
])
})
.then(() => {
// takes approximately 14 seconds to get here
console.log(meSpeak.isConfigLoaded());
console.log(meSpeak.speak("what it do my ninja", {
amplitude: 100,
pitch: 5,
speed: 150,
wordgap: 1,
variant: "m7",
rawdata: "mime"
}));
})
.catch(err => console.log(err));
There is also workaround using MediaRecorder, depending on system hardware How to capture generated audio from window.speechSynthesis.speak() call?.