There are things that are text-only and things that are multimedia. Then there's this hack, which turns boring old text into multimedia—specifically, a .wav file.

WARNING

Listening to your computer's rendition of the Spider-Man theme song can be detrimental to your health.

As you're playing with this code, you might want to think of more sublime and less ridiculous implementations. Do you have a site read by low-vision people? Are there short bits of text, such as a local weather forecast, that would be useful for them to have read aloud? Would it be helpful to have a button that would convert a story summary to a .wav file for later download?

The Code

One of the modules used with this code, Win32::Sound, is for Win32 machines only. Since it's used to play back the generated .wav file, you will not get a "singing" robot if you're on a non-Win32 machine; you'll just get a .wav file, suitable for playing through your preferred music player.

Save this script as robotkaroake.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use URI::Escape;
use Win32::Sound;
use SOAP::Lite;

# use your own Google API key here!
my $google_key  = "your Google key here";
my $google_wdsl = "GoogleSearch.wsdl";

# load in our lyrics phrase from the command line.
my $lyrics_phrase = shift or die "Usage: robot-karaoke.pl <phrase>\n";

# and perform the search on Google.
my $google_search_term = "intitle:\"$lyrics_phrase\" site:lyricsfreak.com";
my $googleSearch = SOAP::Lite->service("file:$google_wdsl");
my $result = $googleSearch->doGoogleSearch(
                      $google_key, $google_search_term,
                      0, 10, "false", "", "false",
                      "", "", "");

# if there are no matches, then say so and die.
die "No LyricsFreak matches were found for '$lyrics_phrase'.\n"
          if $result->{estimatedTotalResultsCount} == 0;
  
# and take the first Google result as
# the most likely location on LyricsFreak.com.
my @results         = @{$result->{'resultElements'}};
my $first_result    = $results[0];
my $lyricsfreak_url = $first_result->{'URL'};
print "Downloading lyrics from:\n $lyricsfreak_url\n";

# and download the data from LyricsFreak.com.
my $content = get($lyricsfreak_url) or die $!;
print "Connection to LyricsFreak was successful.\n";

# we have the data, so let's parse it.
# all lyrics are stored in a pre tag,
# so we delete everything before and after.
$content =~ s/.*<pre><b>.*<\/b><br>//mgis;
$content =~ s/<\/pre>.*//mgis;
my @lyrics_lines = split("\x0d", $content);

# AT&T's demo TTS service takes a maximum of 30 words,
# so we'll create a mini chunk of the lyrics to send off.
# each of these chunks will be sent to the TTS server
# then saved seperately as multiple mini-wav files.
my (@lyrics_chunks, $current_lyrics_chunk); my $line_counter = 0;
for (my $i = 0; $i <= scalar(@lyrics_lines) - 1; ++$i) {
    next if $lyrics_lines[$i] =~ /^\s*$/;
    $current_lyrics_chunk .= $lyrics_lines[$i] . "\n";

    if (($line_counter == 5) || ($i == scalar(@lyrics_lines) - 1) ) {
        push(@lyrics_chunks, $current_lyrics_chunk);
        $current_lyrics_chunk = ''; $line_counter = 0;
    } $line_counter++;
}

# now, we'll go through each chunk,
# and send it off to our TTS server.
my @temporary_wav_files;
foreach my $lyrics_chunk (@lyrics_chunks) {

    # and download the data.
    my $url = 'http://morrissey.naturalvoices.com/tts/cgi-bin/nph-talk';
    my $req = HTTP::Request->new('POST', $url); # almost there!
    $req->content('txt=' . uri_escape($lyrics_chunk) .
                  '&voice=crystal&speakButton=SPEAK');
    $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
    my $res = LWP::UserAgent->new->simple_request($req);

    # incorrect server response? then die.
    unless ($res->is_success || $res->code == 301) {
       die "Error connecting to TTS server: " . $res->status_line . ".\n"; }

    # didn't get the response we wanted? die.
    if ($res->content !~ /can be found <A HREF=([^>]*)>here<\/A>/i) {
       die "Response from TTS server not understood. Odd.\n"; }

    # side effect of error checking above is to set $1 to
    # the actual wav file that was generated. this is good.
    my $wav_url  = "http://morrissey.naturalvoices.com$1";
    my $wav_file = $1; # for use in saving to disk.
    $wav_file =~ s/.*?\/(\w+.wav)/$1/;
    getstore($wav_url, "$wav_file") or
     die "Download of $wav_file failed: $!";
    push(@temporary_wav_files, $wav_file);
}

# with all our files downloaded, play them in
# order with the Win32::Sound module. else, they
# just sit there in hopes of the user playing them.
print  "Playing downloaded wav files...\n";
foreach my $temporary_wav_file (@temporary_wav_files) {
    print " Now Playing: $temporary_wav_file\n";
    Win32::Sound::Play("$temporary_wav_file");

}