Introducing Klattersynth TTS for Unity, now available in the Unity Asset Store.

It’s a really small and fully embedded speech synthesizer (a text-to-speech engine).

In contrast to some other speech assets, it does not need a network connection for generating speech using a 3rd party website, and it also does not use the speech synthesizer embedded in the Operating System (which differs based on what OS and what OS version you’re using).

Instead it’s fully embedded and runs probably on all platforms targeted by the Unity engine. It can generate and stream the speech real-time or it can pre-generate & cache clips and play them later. The audio clips are also played using a normal Unity AudioSource component, so they’ll also work with the 3D spatialization and reverb zones. Klattersynth TTS is contained in a ~100 KB “cross-platform” DLL file for Unity, which zip-compresses down to less than 30 KB!

You can try a WebGL demo build yourself in Klattersynth TTS website, or view showcase videos in YouTube.

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About 9 months after the release, I finally took a bit of time to add a page about this demo and also write a little bit about it. Frutos do mar was a demo for the Assembly 2014 demo competition.

Read more from its own page.

Or just watch it in YouTube if you’re not interested in details about it.

Introducing my third little thing for the Unity Asset Store:

Internet Reachability Verifier for Unity

It’s a simple thing, but there wasn’t other assets available doing exactly this. Since I needed to build something like this, I figured out I’ll polish it a bit and put to asset store as well.

So what does it do, since Unity API already has Application.internetReachability?

The Application.internetReachability has a bit misleading name – it actually tells if it is technically possible for you to try to use the network. So, on a desktop machine it will always tell you that you can. On a mobile device it’s nice for checking if you’re really offline, or if you can try to make a connection (and if it is going to use WiFi or carrier data).

However, with mobile devices, quite often you need to go through a login web page before the internet truly works. In such wireless network, any WWW request will actually give you the login page instead of the data you actually wanted. This is the situation why you want to use Internet Reachability Verifier – read more details from its own web page.

Here are also some other assets to check out:

• Google Universal Analytics for Unity
• Pixel-Perfect Dynamic Text
• Klattersynth TTS NEW!

Here’s my second addition to the Unity Asset Store:

Pixel-Perfect Dynamic Text for Unity

Here’s a “TL;DR” description of what’s it all about:
Pixel-perfect Dynamic Fonts for Unity! Dynamic Text is a component for displaying pixel-perfect camera-facing text. Size & position are defined in world units. Sharp like built-in GUIText, but part of the scene like TextMesh.

The Pixel-Perfect Dynamic Text page linked above has lots more info which I’m not going to repeat all here. But, shortly said, the page describes some common issues when working with text, and how the Pixel-Perfect Dynamic Text asset helps to solve them. There’s also a long list of features to convince you why it’s good. However, also the few trade-offs and caveats are listed. And, there’s a bunch of questions and answers listed and the version history.

But, don’t forget to check out the interactive demo (Unity Webplayer plugin needed), or a YouTube video of the demo. If you run the web player demo, remember to try changing the size of that browser window, so you see how the Pixel-Perfect Dynamic Text adapts to the new resolution.

There’s also a “Lorem Ipsum”-demo version, which lets you try the asset freely inside Unity. But it generates the text mesh using characters from the well known text instead of your string.

Here are also some other assets to check out:

• Internet Reachability Verifier
• Google Universal Analytics for Unity
• Klattersynth TTS NEW!