Status update

This project is currently unmaintained and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

This script and many others like it rely on an unofficial API that has recently become increasingly difficult to support. As Google continues to lock down access to their TTS interface I see no choice other than to suspend maintaining this script for the time being. I sincerely hope that the future will see an official way to use Google TTS on desktop Linux. Until then, please feel free to fork this project if you want to try to fix it.

As a last note: Make sure to also check out the section on similar projects provided in this README.

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Simple Google™ TTS

Ever wanted to use Google text-to-speech on Linux? Now you can.

Table of Contents

• Description
• Why use this script?
• Installation and dependencies
  • Dependencies
  • Installation
• Usage
  • General usage
  • Detailed explanation
  • Options
  • Supported languages
  • More examples
• Known issues
• Similar projects
• License

Description

The intent of this project is to provide an easy way to use text-to-speech output by Google on your Linux desktop. The script supports reading from standard input, plain text files, and highlighted text. A fall-back interface based on pico2wave takes care of the TTS output when you are offline.

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simple-google-tts is based on speak.pl by Michal Fapso which uses an unofficial Google TTS API. This results in several limitations. simple_google_tts and speak.pl try to work around some of these issues, e.g. requests being limited to 100 characters, but are subject to other restrictions, e.g. obligatory CAPTCHA input for overly frequent requests. Please keep this in mind when using this project.

Why use this script?

Note: What follows is a technical explanation of the inner workings of speak.pl and simple_google_tts. You don't have to read this to understand how to use this program, but it can help shed some light on the issues you might experience.

Google imposes a 100-character limit on their speech synthesis service that makes it hard to use their TTS system for anything other than short sentences.

speak.pl works around this limitation by breaking the text input down into appropriate chunks. These chunks are set intelligently based on punctuation and syntax of the text. Having processed all chunks speak.pl then concatenates the speech fragments into one audio file while truncating segments of silence at the start and end of each fragment.

All of these processing steps ensure a relatively natural voice output and minimize the number of clunky pauses caused by the 100-character limitation. The one remaining problem with this approach is that the waiting time between user input and voice playback scales drastically with the length of the text.

This is where simple_google_tts comes in: Instead of passing the text directly to speak.pl, simple_google_tts first breaks down the input into paragraphs. The paragraphs are then processed one by one with each paragraph being played back while the next one is synthesized. Any length of text can be parsed with reasonable speed in this manner.

Additionally, simple_google_tts includes automatic playback, more input modes, an offline TTS back-end, and several adjustments that facilitate parsing of documents with fixed formatting (e.g. selected text in PDF files).

All of this could have probably been accomplished a lot more elegantly within the original speak.pl script, but I am not familiar with perl.

Installation and dependencies

The following instructions are provided for Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

Dependencies

Overview of all dependencies

You can install all dependencies with the following command:

sudo apt-get install xsel libnotify-bin libttspico0 libttspico-utils libttspico-data libwww-perl libwww-mechanize-perl libhtml-tree-perl sox libsox-fmt-mp3

A breakdown of the dependencies by component and role:

simple_google_tts

xsel provides support for parsing the X selection contents

libnotify-bin is used for GUI notifications

pico2wave provides the offline speech synthesis back-end

The actual audio playback is handled by sox, which is part of speak.pl's dependencies.

speak.pl

Dependencies, as listed in speak.pl's header:

libwww-perl libwww-mechanize-perl libhtml-tree-perl sox libsox-fmt-mp3

Perl should be part of your default Debian/Ubuntu installation.

Installation

1. Install all dependencies

2. Clone this repository:

    git clone https://github.com/Glutanimate/simple-google-tts.git
   

3. Navigate to the download directory

    cd simple-google-tts
   

You should be able to run ./simple_google_tts now. If you wish you can symlink simple_google_tts to your PATH (e.g. ~/bin or /usr/local/bin) to make it easier to access.

speak.pl must always reside in the same directory as simple_google_tts.

Usage

General usage

simple_google_tts <options> <languagecode> <input>

E.g.:

$ simple_google_tts en "Hello World"
Reading from string.
Using Google for TTS synthesis.
Synthesizing virtual speech.
Processing 1 out of 1 paragraphs
Playing synthesized speech 1
All sections processed. Waiting for playback to finish.

Detailed explanation

simple_google_tts can read text from standard input or a text file. The syntax is the same in each case. The script will automatically identify the type of input provided and perform the text to speech synthesis via speak.pl.

If no arguments are provided simple_google_tts will try to read from the current X selection. This corresponds with the currently highlighted text. Using this functionality you can set up a keyboard shortcut that automatically reads out selected text.

At all times you can access an overview of all supported options by invoking the help output:

$ simple_google_tts -h
simple_google_tts [-p|-g|-h] languagecode ['strings'|'file.txt']

    -p:   use offline TTS (pico2wave) instead of Google's TTS system
    -g:   activate gui notifications (via notify-send)
    -h:   display this help section

    Selection of valid language codes: en, es, de...
    Check speak.pl for a list of all valid codes

    Warning: offline TTS only supports en, de, es, fr, it

    If an instance of the script is already running it will be terminated.

    If you don't provide an input string or input file, simple_google_tts
    will read from the X selection (current/last highlighted text)

Options

• -p: By default simple_google_tts will use speak.pl to query Google's speech synthesis service and only fall back to pico2wave if no Internet connection is found. If you don't want to use Google's TTS service you can use this option to default to pico2wave speech synthesis.
• -g: If you plan to assign simple_google_tts to a keyboard shortcut you can use this option to enable GUI notifications using libnotify-bin (the default notification daemon).
• -h: Display help section

Supported languages

Google TTS

Google's TTS service currently supports the following language codes:

af  Afrikaans
sq  Albanian
am  Amharic
ar  Arabic
hy  Armenian
az  Azerbaijani
eu  Basque
be  Belarusian
bn  Bengali
bh  Bihari
bs  Bosnian
br  Breton
bg  Bulgarian
km  Cambodian
ca  Catalan
zh-CN Chinese (Simplified)
zh-TW Chinese (Traditional)
co  Corsican
hr  Croatian
cs  Czech
da  Danish
nl  Dutch
en  English
eo  Esperanto
et  Estonian
fo  Faroese
tl  Filipino
fi  Finnish
fr  French
fy  Frisian
gl  Galician
ka  Georgian
de  German
el  Greek
gn  Guarani
gu  Gujarati
ha  Hausa
iw  Hebrew
hi  Hindi
hu  Hungarian
is  Icelandic
id  Indonesian
ia  Interlingua
ga  Irish
it  Italian
ja  Japanese
jw  Javanese
kn  Kannada
kk  Kazakh
rw  Kinyarwanda
rn  Kirundi
ko  Korean
ku  Kurdish
ky  Kyrgyz
lo  Laothian
la  Latin
lv  Latvian
ln  Lingala
lt  Lithuanian
mk  Macedonian
mg  Malagasy
ms  Malay
ml  Malayalam
mt  Maltese
mi  Maori
mr  Marathi
mo  Moldavian
mn  Mongolian
sr-ME Montenegrin
ne  Nepali
no  Norwegian
nn  Norwegian (Nynorsk)
oc  Occitan
or  Oriya
om  Oromo
ps  Pashto
fa  Persian
pl  Polish
pt-BR Portuguese (Brazil)
pt-PT Portuguese (Portugal)
pa  Punjabi
qu  Quechua
ro  Romanian
rm  Romansh
ru  Russian
gd  Scots Gaelic
sr  Serbian
sh  Serbo-Croatian
st  Sesotho
sn  Shona
sd  Sindhi
si  Sinhalese
sk  Slovak
sl  Slovenian
so  Somali
es  Spanish
su  Sundanese
sw  Swahili
sv  Swedish
tg  Tajik
ta  Tamil
tt  Tatar
te  Telugu
th  Thai
ti  Tigrinya
to  Tonga
tr  Turkish
tk  Turkmen
tw  Twi
ug  Uighur
uk  Ukrainian
ur  Urdu
uz  Uzbek
vi  Vietnamese
cy  Welsh
xh  Xhosa
yi  Yiddish
yo  Yoruba
zu  Zulu 

Please note that, out of these, the pico2wave back-end only supports the following languages:

en  English
de  German
es  Spanish
fr  French
it  Italian

More examples

Read English text from file

simple_google_tts en readme.md

Read from X selection, using pico2wave, and enable notifications

simple_google_tts -gp en

Known issues

• to prevent simultaneous output the script tries to force only one instance at a time. Unfortunately this fails sometimes, which can be a problem when using the script through a keyboard shortcut

• there is no easy way to terminate the TTS output if the script is used via a keyboard shortcut.

  Highlighting an empty line or space and then executing the script should, in theory, terminate the last script instance and stop the playback. Because of the first issue this does not always work.

  You could probably assign another hotkey to terminate any running instances of the script (e.g. pkill -9 simple_google_tts; warning: I have yet to try this out).

• too many requests too quickly will cause Google to start requesting CAPTCHA input. I have yet to hit this limit in my regular use of the script.

Similar projects

• desbma/GoogleSpeech
• pndurette/gTTS

License

speak.pl copyright 2012 Michal Fapso

simple_google_tts copyright 2014 Glutanimate

simple_google_tts is licensed under the GNU GPLv3. For licensing information concerning speak.pl please contact Michal Fapso.

This project is not endorsed, certified or otherwise approved in any way by Google™.