Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

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kaizen
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Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby kaizen » Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:25 pm

I've been using http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepa%20l for a few years and have been quite happy with it. However I'm not able to use it anymore as there appears to be some kind of conflict between Firefox and the QuickTime plugin it uses.

If anyone knows an easy way around this, that would be great. Or if you know of another similar site, that would also work. I use it to create audio files of sentences (usually Spanish and French, and sometimes Japanese) that I then put into Anki. I've tried Google Translate a few times, and the audio always sounds funny.

Thanks
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby Rebecca » Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:52 pm

I use the Awesome TTS Anki add-on which can automatically add audio to your Anki cards. For most languages there are quite a few different 'voices' you can choose from. I personally use the Manon voice from the Acapela group for French. It is much easier than generating individual sentences and then adding them to all your cards manually! :)
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby Jar-Ptitsa » Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:36 pm

In my school we had text-to-speech options instead of reading, if we wanted / needed this. I don't remember its name, but anyway, I finsihed school about 3 or 4 years ago, so the technology would be old now.

Ivona has many languages and you can type a short text https://www.ivona.com/

This can read different things and there are many options for the langauge and reader http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.html
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jun 21, 2016 5:44 pm

Rebecca wrote:I use the Awesome TTS Anki add-on which can automatically add audio to your Anki cards. For most languages there are quite a few different 'voices' you can choose from. I personally use the Manon voice from the Acapela group for French. It is much easier than generating individual sentences and then adding them to all your cards manually! :)


Same here. I use the on-the-fly option instead of making individual files (gigantic deck!), and so far, it has been pretty accurate for Mandarin and Cantonese (my only TTS languages at the moment). I wouldn't be surprised if it worked even better for other languages.
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby kaizen » Sat Jun 25, 2016 8:59 pm

Thanks to all of you for your replies. I'll try each of those out and see which works best for me.
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby Iversen » Sat Jul 02, 2016 5:25 pm

I have used acapela a lot .... though not as much the last year or so where my music collection has been distracting me.
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby Soffía » Sat Jul 02, 2016 6:30 pm

The Icelandic national broadcaster uses ReadSpeaker, which sounds amazingly natural. It's pricy but might be worth it depending on how much you're planning to use it. You can try out passages of up to 250 characters online.

http://textaid.readspeaker.com
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby Soffía » Sat Jul 02, 2016 6:33 pm

Iversen wrote:I have used acapela a lot .... though not as much the last year or so where my music collection has been distracting me.

How on earth did acapela decide to offer Faroese but not Icelandic?? I just have to wonder.
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Re: Online text-to-speech site for various languages?

Postby mcthulhu » Fri Apr 14, 2017 10:53 pm

I don't know if it's been addressed here before, but Amazon Web Services' Polly at https://console.aws.amazon.com/polly/ho ... sizeSpeech has some very high-quality voices, 47 of them, for a couple dozen languages. This is a relatively new AWS offering, I think since the end of last year. The demo page at the above URL lets you hear the speech online, or save it to an MP3. You can process up to 5 million characters per month for free; after that it's 4/10 of a cent per minute of speech. The AWS blog announcing Polly estimated that this would equate to $2.40 for the full text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I personally am not likely to go beyond 5 million characters for personal use in a single month, but if I somehow do, it will still be very inexpensive.

Amazon provides sample programs for using Polly's API, including a script in Python for running a local TTS server on your own machine that you can call from your Web browser. There is a sample command for using the AWS command line interface to get an MP3 file from Polly:

Code: Select all

aws polly synthesize-speech \
  --output-format mp3 --voice-id Joanna \
  --text "Hello my name is Joanna." \
  joanna.mp3


Polly obviously requires that you have an active Amazon/AWS account, and if you're calling it programmatically you'll probably need to have your AWS credentials stored on your own machine, which takes a few steps but is not that difficult. I'm in the process of integrating Polly into my own software now.

The most significant limitation seems to be a 1500-character limit per call; but there are already a couple of sample programs on GitHub showing how to split a longer text into chunks and then recombine the audio. That might be irrelevant anyway for some applications, like getting an audio clip for a flashcard.
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