Creating a simple text to speech program like Wall-E with nodeJS

Creating your own WALL-E

First of all to introduce you to what nodejs can do, we will start with a small project and use an available third party library named Say.js for our text-to-speech program. With this you can build your own WALL-E.

First let's install the libraries we need for this project: 

npm i --save say

npm i --save lodash

Let's import them using:

const say = require('say'); 

const _ = require('lodash');

let's try if the say library is working by making the computer say Hello World (literally of course!!!)

say.speak('Hello World');

😮 It does work right? Now remove that line and let's create something like a speech logger so that everything we ex'ed on our todo list, the computer will let us know by telling it to us loud and clear using the say library:

	async function logger(string) {
	return new Promise(resolve => {
	say.speak(string, null, null, (err) => {
	resolve();
	});
	});
	}

view raw index.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

What this does is we wrapped our say.speak in a promise so that everytime we call the logger the computer will stop and wait for the computer to finish speaking before it executes the next line of code (after calling the resolve() function).

If we did not do this you will hear all the texts being said all at the same time. 😩

So let's move on and create our simple todo program where we will use our speech logger:

	async function runApp(name) {
	const todos = [];
	const done = [];
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Clean the bathroom',name);
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Wash my face', name);
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Eat my breakfast', name);
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Slep again!!!', name);
	console.log('todos', todos)
	//let's mark the todo list as done
	await doneTodoList(done, todos[0], name);
	await doneTodoList(done, todos[1], name);
	await doneTodoList(done, todos[2], name);
	await console.log('done', done)
	let remaining = await getRemainingTodos(todos, done, name);
	console.log('remaining', remaining);
	}

view raw index.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now that we are done with the flow of the program let's create all of our helper functions. Let's create our addToTodoList function, we call this everytime we add a todo in our todo list.

	async function addToTodoList(todos, todo, name) {
	todos.push(todo);
	await logger(`Adding ${todo} to your todo list, ${name}`);
	}

view raw index.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

What's a todo list without a way to mark it as done. So let's create that function next:

	async function doneTodoList(doneList, todo, name) {
	doneList.push(todo);
	await logger(`You just finished ${todo}, I'll mark it as done, ${name}`);
	}

view raw index.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And, lastly, we may need to create a function to let us know the remaining todos we still need todo for the day:

	async function getRemainingTodos(todos, done, name) {
	let remaining = _.filter(todos, todo => {
	return !done.includes(todo);
	});
	if (remaining && remaining.length > 0) {
	await logger(`You still have ${remaining.length} remaining todos, ${name}`);
	} else {
	await logger(`You've done a good job today '${name}`)
	}
	return remaining;
	}

view raw index.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You may see that we put a lot of await keyword everytime we used the logger function, this is so that it tells the computer to wait till it finishes that line of code (till the promise is resolved).

Once everything is ready and done we can now run the app by calling this:

runApp('Rob');

As you can notice, I passed a name in the runApp function so that the computer can call us by our name. Run the program with:

node index.js

Conclusion

Creating a text to speech program nowadays is very easy because of the technology and third party libraries available in the node package manager. Below, I attached the audio and console logs from the program so you get the idea of what the apped does and that it works:

Here is the full source code for the project:

	//https://github.com/marak/say.js/
	const say = require('say');
	const _ = require('lodash');
	async function logger(string) {
	return new Promise(resolve => {
	say.speak(string, null, null, (err) => {
	resolve();
	});
	})
	}
	//run the app
	runApp('Rob');
	async function runApp(name) {
	const todos = [];
	const done = [];
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Clean the bathroom',name);
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Wash my face', name);
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Eat my breakfast', name);
	await addToTodoList(todos, 'Slep again!!!', name);
	console.log('todos', todos)
	//let's mark the todo list as done
	await doneTodoList(done, todos[0], name);
	await doneTodoList(done, todos[1], name);
	await doneTodoList(done, todos[2], name);
	await console.log('done', done)
	let remaining = await getRemainingTodos(todos, done, name);
	console.log('remaining', remaining)
	}
	async function addToTodoList(todos, todo, name) {
	todos.push(todo);
	await logger(`Adding ${todo} to your todo list, ${name}`);
	}
	async function doneTodoList(doneList, todo, name) {
	doneList.push(todo);
	await logger(`You just finished ${todo}, I'll mark it as done, ${name}`);
	}
	async function getRemainingTodos(todos, done, name) {
	let remaining = _.filter(todos, todo => {
	return !done.includes(todo);
	});
	if (remaining && remaining.length > 0) {
	await logger(`You still have ${remaining.length} remaining todos, ${name}`);
	} else {
	await logger(`You've done a good job today '${name}`)
	}
	return remaining;
	}

view raw index.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Here is the link to the github repo in case you want to clone it: https://github.com/doppelgunner/speech-to-text-to-do-list

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