README

SQUAWK - Parrot-powered Text-to-speech Service
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Overview
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Do you enjoy making computers or phones talk?  Have you ever needed
a text-to-speech engine that doesn't sound terrible?  Do you want
to make use of a web service whose name sounds like a parrot's?

Introducing SQUAWK, the parrot-powered text-to-speech service!

The SQUAWK script is a simple web service wrapper around the Amazon
Polly text-to-speech engine.  It is perfect for use with an Asterisk
phone system, as it is capable of directly creating output that
meets Asterisk's rather strict requirements for WAV file formatting,
while yielding speech that is far more intelligible over the phone
than output from the text-to-speech programs available natively on
FreePBX.

SQUAWK is a python script that runs inside of Amazon's Lambda compute
service.  It uses the Chalice python library to set up a web service
endpoint in AWS API Gateway that clients can then use to access the
service.  An API key is required to render text to speech.  Managing
those API keys is left as an exercise to the reader.