Nearly a year since we talked about Google Translate and Text-to-Speech on groovyPost, they have just pushed a massive language update. By using an open-source synthesizing software, eSpeak, Google was able to bring in support for a lot more languages.
Text-to-Speech is newly available for these additional languages:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
What is eSpeak?
eSpeak is an open source project that offers a compact downloadable text to voice synthesizer. Additionally, it allows customization of nearly all aspects of a voice so that it can be tuned to fit many different dialects. It might not sound like a high-quality human voice, but it get’s the job done better than nearly any other software out there.
You can download eSpeak and try it out for yourself, or visit the Google Translator and try a few of the above languages to hear how the Google Team’s tuning sounds.
Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate [via theGoogleOS.com]
3 Comments
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Dario
This is great… but… Google voices are much better than eSpeak voices.. how can I get these improved voices??? Thanks!
Benjamin
I want to know this also… if it’s based off of an open source application they should help the open community by providing us with better voice files
Mike
Did anyone got any answer about improved voices for the eSpeak? I’ve been looking for a while without any success.