run-time speech synthesizer

I like the recent campaigns that have been developed that make extensive use of voice-overs. However, I much prefer designing dynamic missions, where the radio traffic is not known in advance, but is situation-dependent developing out of the dynamic evolution of the mission. It is of course possible to display text messages generated by the mission script that reflect the dynamic situation at a particular time of the mission. But how about speech output?

My question now is: is there a run-time speech synthesizer tool that can be used for that purpose? In principle it should be possible, since I remember from the old Amiga times, you could have the Amiga computer speak a text sentence you fed to the command.

Hope that makes sense, and I'm looking forward to suggestions.

I haven't even attempted to create a mission requiring triggers etc since DCS 1.2 and I wasn't any good at it then. So for sure I have No Idea what can and cannot be done using ME today.

But based on your premise one would think that it should be possible although I have no idea how one would do that.

However, if DCS's ME were based on Logic-type scripting, I would think that there could be a List of Responses (that could include voice and/or text scripts) that could be selected Run during any specific triggered situation where the script used "IF", "Else" and "EndIf" type prompts.

Quoted from the Interwebs !

"An IF statement is a control structure that you can use to process scripts depending on the result that a condition supplies. A condition is a logical expression. ... When the IF block does not contain an :ELSE branch, it continues with the next line that follows the :ENDIF statement."

Maybe there is an equivalent structure in DCS's ME that might be able to achieve this same result ?

I hope this makes some sense to you and others because I've already pretty much confused myself !!

The scripting engine is not the problem. In fact, if you really want you can create a basic voice synthesizer containing a list of known words. The problem is how the sound works in DCS. Only one sound can be played at a time so basically if you want to add one sound after the other in ME only the first sound will play. You can easily create with scripting a sequence like : "Chevy One One unable to take off" by looping until the end of phrase and inserting delays equal with the previous spoken word. This can be done and it has been done to my knowledge as I clearly seen it in the scripting section simply by using existing sounds in the library. So, the short answer to the original question is YES. The long answer is a MAYBE and not because it is impossible but because of the time needed to achieve such a thing. I thought of it but I rather wait for something from ED and if this is not coming then, why not giving it a whirl?

I actually had something different in mind. For example, we can have Microsoft speech read a text for us. So, I was wondering if there is a way of starting with a string, e.g. "Hello world" in a lua script, then from the lua script call Microsoft speech (or something similar) in pseudo code "local audio = MicrosoftSpeech('Hello world')", which passes the sound file corresponding to the text back to the lua code that called it, and then I go "trigger.action.outSound(audio)"

Hope that makes sense.

You can't make system calls with lua from DCS unless you desanitize os, io lua packages. This is a security risk and disabled by default (you can comment the lines but it will not pass integrity check online.Also an upgrade will revert it to default)