React Web Voice

Overview

react-web-voice is a library created to ease the integration of Web Speech Api (including speech synthesis and speech recognition) to your React web application.

Install

npm install react-web-voice

Web Speech Api Support

At the moment, not all browsers support Web Speech Api. The library has been developed and tested on Google Chrome, which is the only browser fully support Web Speech Api at the moment.

In the future, as other browsers adopt this feature, the library will be updated accordingly to support them.

More information on this topic can be found here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API

React Version

The library provide two separated react hooks, namely useSpeech and useRecognition to support voice speaking and voice recognizing respectively.

As React hook is currently an alpha feature, using of the next version of react is required.

useSpeech

Usage

useSpeech can be used in your functional component to access to the speaking functions.

The hook return a list of messages that has already been spoken and a speak function that allow you to order the browser to speak.

const SpeechComponent = () => {
  const { messages, speak } = useSpeech();

  const speakButtonHandler = async () => {
    const utterance = await speak({
      text: 'Hello',
      volume: 0.5,
      rate: 1,
      pitch: 1
    });
  };

  return <button onClick={speakButtonHandler}>Click to speak</button>;
};

Speak function

As shown in the example above the speak function accept a message object which can be used to define the content of the message, the volume, rate and pitch and a callback function after the browser finish speaking.

Configure

By default, useSpeech use the Google Us English, you can require it to use other voice by passing in a config object:

// To get the full list of voices available: window.speechSynthesis.getVoices()
const { messages, speak } = useSpeech({ voice: 'Karen' });

useRecognition

Usage

useRecognition can be used in your functional component to access to the voice recognition functions.

const RecognitionComponent = () => {
  const { transcripts, listen } = useRecognition();

  const listenButtonHandler = async () => {
    const transcript = await listen();
  };

  return <button onClick={listenButtonHandler}>Start speaking</button>;
};

Listen function

As shown in the example above the listen function accept a callback function as its parameter, the callback function will be triggered with the message that the browser detects and recognizes.

Typescript

This project is written in typescript and fully support it.

Demo

An example of how to use these two hooks can found inside the demo folder.

Version 1.0 Breaking Changes

With version 1.0, we decided to get rid of the callback function on both speak and listen function but replacing them with a promise.