lib-say

Say It. Experimental formant-based TTS

This project is part of an experiment : how to create a TTS from the ground up, only by instructing a coding assistant.

Build

Windows batch helper:

build.bat

Direct CMake:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release

The executable is written to bin\tts.exe.

Lua Extension

If the repository contains Lua/ with the vendored Lua sources, CMake uses it automatically and builds:

• bin\lua\lua54.dll
• bin\lua\say.dll

If you prefer an external Lua SDK instead, disable the bundled one:

cmake -S . -B build -DSAY_USE_BUNDLED_LUA=OFF -DLUA_INCLUDE_DIR=C:\path\to\lua\include -DLUA_LIBRARY=C:\path\to\lua54.lib

For an embedded host, those variables should point to the same Lua runtime the host itself uses.

If Lua/ is absent and auto-detection fails, configure CMake with the exact Lua SDK used by the host application that will load the module:

cmake -S . -B build -DLUA_INCLUDE_DIR=C:\path\to\lua\include -DLUA_LIBRARY=C:\path\to\lua54.lib

Typical usage:

package.cpath = package.cpath .. ";./bin/lua/?.dll"

local say = require("say")
local blob, info = say.synthesize("Bonjour depuis Lua", {
    lang = "fr",
    format = "wav"
})

print(info.sample_rate, info.byte_count, blob:GetSize())

The returned blob is a Lua userdata that owns the encoded bytes and exposes GetData() and GetSize(). It is meant to be passed to another Lua extension through a pointer-and-size style API. More details are in documentation/lua.md.