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Google "Translate" text-to-speech

Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 10:00 am
by LVPRadio
Hi,

Still new to ShoutIRC and playing around with the options and plugins, and I really love it. Great job!

One request which would be really nice, if you can manage to add Google Translate text-to-speech as an alternative to eSpeak and festival. Hopefully I don't insult anybody if I say that those voices are terrible. (Or haven't found the "perfect" settings yet.)
While Google Translate, which also uses eSpeak internally but with much better voices, in general has a clear understandable voice.

Two examples:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t ... +Catgroove
http://translate.google.com/translate_t ... r+Stronger

Even in multiple languages:
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=nl&q=text

There is no official API available, but it appears that the output is a MP3 file: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/the-un ... peech-api/

Because there is no official API there is always a chance, if you got this working, that it will stop working some day. A small risk for a large improvement!

Re: Google

Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 12:05 pm
by Indy
The main thing I would worry about is if they start blocking you after a certain # of requests, like X in 24 hours.
I've always heard festival can be set up good, but out of the box it is terrible for sure. eSpeak is a bit better but not great by any means.

Re: Google

Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 2:53 pm
by LVPRadio
Blocking could indeed be a problem, especially since it is no official API.
Ah well, maybe I can try to figure how I can turn espeak or festival into a beautiful (Or at least better) voice :)

Re: Google

Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 5:55 pm
by Indy
It looks like they do have a paid language API, but as far as I can tell it is just text translation and doesn't support TTS.