Google's text-to speech engine voices?

Question

Most of you probably know the text-to-speech synthesizer of google translate, as you can access programmatically here btw:

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text

My impression was it's sometimes using espeak, but in the major languages, the quality is much better than that. Anybody knows what Google is using, or what voices they are using? Clearly it's not the normal and also not the mbrola espeak voices.

Hidden

Translate API requires an API key and it is a paid service nowadays: cloud.google.com/translate/docs – Longheaded

Answer 1

I would look in the list of Google acquisitions
(Wikipedia, list of google acquisitions):

84 December 3, 2010 Phonetic Arts Speech synthesis  UK Google Voice, Google Translate [90]

Sopher

Answer 2

I have made a simple wrap with ruby. https://github.com/c2h2/tts

gem install tts
require 'tts'
'hello world!".to_file "en"

Wizardly

Is there any way to add languages? Esp. Hindi or other Indian Languages as these are supported by Google Translate. Using above code sample works for English but fails for Hindi with following error message : ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/tts-0.4.1/lib/tts.rb:59 :in `to_url': Not accepted language, accpeted are zh,en,it,fr (RuntimeError). – Dreamadreamer

Thanks for the Ruby Gem. I've raised an issue on github. – Dreamadreamer

Answer 3

Try this one:

Speech Util

It´s free, but only for English.

Sheri

Answer 4

I would be surprised if Google translate is using espeak. Firstly, the results are too good and lack many typical espeak flaws. Second, Google is well known to be using ideas like deep nets in their speech group (see the work by Geof Hinton and also http://research.google.com/pubs/SpeechProcessing.html).

Racket

Answer 5

Try pyttsx: https://github.com/parente/pyttsx

$ pip install pyttsx
$ python
>>> import pyttsx
>>> e = pyttsx.init()
>>> e.say('haha hahaha haha haha hahaha')
>>> e.runAndWait()

Deppy

Answer 6

Use the pyttsx3 module for python3.

just use pip install pyttsx3 for installing

Perfuse