The Unofficial Google Text-To-Speech API
- By Viral Patel on December 15, 2009
- Featured, How-To
Do you want to create your own Text-To-Speech convertor? Well, you may want to directly use Google “Unofficial” API to convert Text to Speech.
Google Translate had announced few weeks back some new enhancements. Where a new feature was added that can convert the text into speech.
Now the hack is, you can use the same feature to convert your own text into speech and generate a mp3 out of it. All you have to do it to construct a URL and hit it from browser. For example, if I want to convert text “Hello World” in speech, I will write following url in browser.
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+World
And that’s it. This will generate an MP3 file which you can download and play.
You may want to create a small HTML form to convert text to speech. All you need is to copy following code and create a HTML file in your machine. And run it using any browser.
<form method="get" action="http://translate.google.com/translate_tts"> <textarea name="q"></textarea> <input type="submit" value="Text-To-Speech"></input> </form>
Currently, This “Unofficial” API is limited to 100 characters only. Also I am not till when google will support this API.
Source: Ajaxian
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Here is a basic bookmarklet to use the same..
javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection().toString();if(q){q = q.replace(/\W+/g, ‘+’);q = q.replace(/(^\+|\+$)/g, ”);location.href=’http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=’+q;};})()
There is probably a mistake. “Text-To-Speech” has no attribute assigned. Or is it intentional?
Great tip though.
Already removed…
@Cydork – Thanks for the bookmarklet. :)
@matto – Thanks for pointing out the typo. I have updated the code.
@Luciano – The API is still working for me. I am able to get the mp3.
Ultimate one……………..
Simple but very helpful :)
I get ja 404 error :-(