Text to speech - just weather and time?

[winzurf]

I've been working on using text to speech to convert local weather, news headlines etc. to audio files and then uploading them using ftp - so I was really excited to see that TTS has been added. I now think this is constrained to time and weather only and I cannot just upload a text file with SSML to be converted, is that correct? The information given so far does not really help very much, and as I am currently on a "Little" plan I cannot try it out. A detailed description with screen shots would be really useful too.

 

[djsoft]

I now think this is constrained to time and weather only and I cannot just upload a text file with SSML to be converted, is that correct?

Weather and time are one of the uses for it, you're free to use any text you like, it will read anything. When you add a text-to-speech item, you enter the text you want it to read. The text is currently limited to 512 characters per item.

 

[winzurf]

Thanks, but when you say "enter" that sounds like a manual entry in a form field, or can I upload/ftp a file?

 

[djsoft]

There's a box where you can enter the text, or copy-paste it from somewhere.

 

[winzurf]

So I cannot upload a file - this defeats my need to automate the process I guess.
My current approach is to capture the data, convert it to readable text, convert it using TTS to an audio file, and uploading the audio file to RadioBoss. I was hoping to upload the text file and get RadioBoss to convert to audio.

 

[djsoft]

I was hoping to upload the text file and get RadioBoss to convert to audio.

Currently it does not allow uploading text files (only music) and TTS is at present only reads a text it's assigned, not reading from files. For the future updates we may be considering extending it.
You can copy-paste the file contents into the TTS item.