Using a speech engine to highlight words

Send a piece of text in a simple GUI through a text-to-speech engine (producing spoken output). At the same time as each word is being spoken, highlight the word in the GUI. (The GUI does not need to be interactive, but some extra kudos for allowing users of the code to provide their own text.)

Using a speech engine to highlight words is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be found in its talk page.

AutoHotkey

We use the simple SAPI.SPVoice COM Object and a parsing loop. The highlighting is done with EM_SETSEL and Notepad. Rather crude, but it works. Due to the simplistic nature of the parsing loop, the text ends with a space. <lang AutoHotkey>SetTitleMatchMode 2 EM_SETSEL := 0x00B1

Run notepad,,,pid WinWaitActive ahk_pid %pid% ControlSetText, Edit1, % text := "AutoHotkey was the first to implement this task! ", ahk_pid %pid%

pVoice := ComObjCreate("Sapi.spvoice"), i := 1 ; the spvoice COM Object ships with the OS

parse the text

While lf := SubStr(text, i, 1) {

  If lf = %A_Space%
  {
     SendMessage, EM_SetSel, % i-StrLen(word)-1, % i-1, Edit1, ahk_pid %pid%
     pVoice.speak(word), word := "", i++
  }
  Else word .= lf, i++

}</lang>