FreeTTS Hello World Java Maven

After spending too much time trying to get text to speech (tts) to work and seeing others struggle as well I decided to capture what worked for me. You can checkout the code on github https://github.com/geoinline/textToSpeech, or you can just copy and paste the below code and get hello world working! java code...

 import java.beans.PropertyVetoException;  
 import java.util.Locale;  
 import javax.speech.AudioException;  
 import javax.speech.Central;  
 import javax.speech.EngineException;  
 import javax.speech.EngineStateError;  
 import javax.speech.synthesis.Synthesizer;  
 import javax.speech.synthesis.SynthesizerModeDesc;  
 import javax.speech.synthesis.Voice;  
 public class SpeechUtils {  
  SynthesizerModeDesc desc;  
  Synthesizer synthesizer;  
  Voice voice;  
  public void init(String voiceName)  
      throws EngineException, AudioException, EngineStateError,  
      PropertyVetoException {  
   if (desc == null) {  
    System.setProperty("freetts.voices",  
        "com.sun.speech.freetts.en.us.cmu_us_kal.KevinVoiceDirectory");  
    desc = new SynthesizerModeDesc(Locale.US);  
    Central.registerEngineCentral("com.sun.speech.freetts.jsapi.FreeTTSEngineCentral");  
    synthesizer = Central.createSynthesizer(desc);  
    synthesizer.allocate();  
    synthesizer.resume();  
    SynthesizerModeDesc smd =  
        (SynthesizerModeDesc) synthesizer.getEngineModeDesc();  
    Voice[] voices = smd.getVoices();  
    Voice voice = null;  
    for (int i = 0; i < voices.length; i++) {  
     if (voices[i].getName().equals(voiceName)) {  
      voice = voices[i];  
      break;  
     }  
    }  
    synthesizer.getSynthesizerProperties().setVoice(voice);  
   }  
  }  
  public void terminate() throws EngineException, EngineStateError {  
   synthesizer.deallocate();  
  }  
  public void doSpeak(String speakText)  
      throws EngineException, AudioException, IllegalArgumentException,  
      InterruptedException {  
   synthesizer.speakPlainText(speakText, null);  
   synthesizer.waitEngineState(Synthesizer.QUEUE_EMPTY);  
  }  
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {  
   SpeechUtils su = new SpeechUtils();  
   su.init("kevin16");  
   su.doSpeak("Hello world!");  
   su.terminate();  
  }  
 }  

add this to your pom.xml...

 <dependencies>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>junit</groupId>  
    <artifactId>junit</artifactId>  
    <version>3.8.1</version>  
    <scope>test</scope>  
   </dependency>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>javax.speech</groupId>  
    <artifactId>jsapi</artifactId>  
    <version>1.0</version>  
   </dependency>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>org.mobicents.external.freetts</groupId>  
    <artifactId>cmu_us_kal</artifactId>  
    <version>1.0</version>  
   </dependency>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>org.mobicents.external.freetts</groupId>  
    <artifactId>cmu_time_awb</artifactId>  
    <version>1.0</version>  
   </dependency>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>org.mobicents.external.freetts</groupId>  
    <artifactId>freetts</artifactId>  
    <version>1.0</version>  
   </dependency>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>org.mobicents.external.freetts</groupId>  
    <artifactId>en_us</artifactId>  
    <version>1.0</version>  
   </dependency>  
   <dependency>  
    <groupId>org.mobicents.external.freetts</groupId>  
    <artifactId>cmulex</artifactId>  
    <version>1.0</version>  
   </dependency>  
  </dependencies>  
  <repositories>  
   <repository>  
    <id>speech</id>  
    <name>speech</name>  
    <url>http://maven.it.su.se/it.su.se/maven2</url>  
   </repository>  
   <repository>  
    <id>java.net-m2</id>  
    <name>java.net - Maven 2</name>  
    <url>https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/repositories/java.net-m2</url>  
   </repository>  
  </repositories>  

Should work right out of the box. Let me know if you have any trouble.