iOS Text To Speech Api

I can't seem to find anything on this. Are there any Siri classes or API's in iOS7 that let you do text to speech? All I am trying to do is something like the following:

[siriInstance say:@"This is a test"];

And then have Siri say it from my app.

It seems we should be capable of doing this, no? Seems like a trivial thing.

Since iOS 7 you have a new TTS Api.

In Objective C

AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer alloc]init];
AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:@"Some text"];
[utterance setRate:0.2f];
[synthesizer speakUtterance:utterance];

In Swift

let synthesizer = AVSpeechSynthesizer()
let utterance = AVSpeechUtterance(string: "Some text")
utterance.rate = 0.2

You can also change the voice like this :

utterance.voice = AVSpeechSynthesisVoice(language: "fr-FR")

And then speek

• In Swift 2 synthesizer.speakUtterance(utterance)

• In Swift 3 synthesizer.speak(utterance)

Don't forget to import AVFoundation

Helpful methods

You can Stop or Pause all speech using these two methods :

- (BOOL)pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:(AVSpeechBoundary)boundary;
- (BOOL)stopSpeakingAtBoundary:(AVSpeechBoundary)boundary;

The AVSpeechBoundary indicates if the speech should pause or stop immediately (AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate) or it should pause or stop after the word currently being spoken (AVSpeechBoundaryWord).

Check the AVSpeechSynthesizer Doc

This is Ali ABBAS' answer for use in a playground:

import UIKit
import AVKit
import AVFoundation
import PlaygroundSupport

var str = "Hello, playground"

let synthesizer = AVSpeechSynthesizer()
let utterance = AVSpeechUtterance(string: str)
utterance.rate = 0.4
utterance.voice = AVSpeechSynthesisVoice(language: "en-US")

//for playground only
let playerViewController = AVPlayerViewController()
PlaygroundPage.current.liveView = playerViewController.view
//

synthesizer.speak(utterance)