I tried to get SAPI to work for a few hours and gave up on it. Would really like to see speech recognition so that the player can give orders to AI buddies.
Text to speech will never give a good result. You won’t be able to make it sound like a natural voice.
Some get close but they are very specialized softwares and costs a gigaton of money to use.
It’s not so much about the text to speech, which could be useful in some circumstances… but more about the reverse, speech to text. When you can use speech to text, then you can use speech as an input device (or just to “chit-chat” with your friends over multiplayer/online).
The main issue issue here, I think, is that you will need at least three different support levels, iOS, android, and windows.
Hi,
You can find good TTS solutions. You may want to start from IVONA at www.ivona.com , really amazing naturalness in many languages. As far as I can see, the technology is available for many platforms, including iOS, Android, PC, Mac.
Do you need SDK for PS/Xbox as well?
Cheers,
IVONA is just a TTS service. What I think most us are looking for is the actual engine integrated into Unreal.
Its fairly easy to do in Unity, due to Unity using c# / .net framework… its the speech.recognition namespace.
Implementing into c++ is alot harder to do, since you need to interface with the COM and SAPI interfaces.
edit: as far as TTS voices go, this would be mostly user preferences. Let them purchase TTS voices… unless your a dev studio.
I have interest on this kind of thing, but will dig into it only after I finish the loads of things I’ve got to do 
Hey guys, for some project I am working on integrating Text-to speech and windows speech recognition to UE4.
so far the progress in quite promising and surely I would manage to do it soon.
I wanted to ask what are the functionalities that you want from it ?