Earlier this month we showed you RetroArch’s world first text to speech implementation for emulators. You can read that previous article here.

Since then, this feature has been immeasurably improved. Onscreen character recognition and live text to speech translation is now done at the press of a button. You bind the AI Service key to a button or key of your choice, and as soon as you press it, a scan of the image will be taken in real-time. Any characters that were recognized as text will then be translated from text to speech.

In this video, we are running a local instance of vgtranslate on the same computer. This cuts down a lot on the latency you could perceive in the previous video. The other big difference is that the core no longer has to be paused manually and then unpaused to do the OCR scan – you now press a hotkey and the game continues running without any interruption. This provides for a much more smooth and seamless experience.

Shown in this video is a test run of several cores and games: Quake 1 with the Tyrquake core, Mega Man 4 with a NES emulator core, Trials of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 3 with a SNES emulator core, and finally Castlevania 3 with a NES emulator core. The OCR/text to speech system works with ANY libretro core that does not use hardware acceleration right now. So any core that doesn’t rely on OpenGL/Vulkan/Direct3D in order to function should be good to go.