Scratch speaking German, French, Spanish.....

Scratch 3 the gift that keeps on giving; including the new extensions are Text to Speech and Translate; Text to speech - does as the name suggests, turns typed in phrases into speech via Amazon Web Services. Translate using Google (and I assume Google Translate?) to translate text between different languages.

As an experiment, I waned to play with clapping my hands, have Scratch the Cat ask me to enter a phrase and then convert that into French, German and Spanish with different voices. The resulting code is shown below.

It is all started by a loud noise like a hand clap. The two extensions have been added to the blocks and are ready to go. The voice is initially set to Alto and the text-speech block has had the phrase "Please enter a phrase" typed in and says this. The ask block has the same question permanently set and the answer produced gets feed into the translations. 

The remaining blocks do essentially the same thing
- change the voice;
- take the phrase typed in (via answer) and convert to the language of choice;
- wait a second.


It is great fun, I am not sure all the languages work but what is there is cool to play with. In an ideal world instead of typing the phrase it would be great to just say the phrase...maybe in the future. 

The code is available at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/282312832/.



All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Scratch and web-cams in Scratch 3

Scratch 3 was launched on 2nd January 2019, so I wanted to know would Webcams still work with Scratch 3 as it did with Scratch 2. For example, in a previous post Scratch, webcams, cats and explosions the cat (Scratch) moved across the screen and a button burst when the object moved in the camera onto it. 

Can the same thing be done in Scratch 3? The short answer is yes, but it is done slightly differently.

The first change the video capture is not there in the blocks automatically; but is an extension that needs to be added. First, you need to add the extension blocks for video sensing. Go to the little icon at the bottom left of the screen (as shown below) this takes you to the extensions menu.

Next, find the Video Sensing option and selected. The webcam, if enabled, with start automatically.

A video sensing set of blocks is now in the list of block options. 

The rest is very similar to doing this in Scratch 2.

Moving Scratch: The code below moves the cat backwards and forwards depending on whether the object is moving left to right on the screen, or not.

The bursting bubble is done with the code below. When the object in the camera is on the button; make a popping noise, switch to an image (costume) that of a burst button, wait 1 second and return to the whole button image.

The code is available at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/276892758/ please feel free to improve it and let me know. 



All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon