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.
Ever wanted to use Google text-to-speech on Linux? Now you can.
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.
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.
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.
The following instructions are provided for Debian/Ubuntu based systems.
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-mp3A 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.
Install all dependencies
Clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/Glutanimate/simple-google-tts.gitNavigate to the download directory
cd simple-google-ttsYou 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.
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.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)-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 sectionGoogle 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 ItalianRead English text from file
simple_google_tts en readme.mdRead from X selection, using pico2wave, and enable notifications
simple_google_tts -gp ento 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.
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™.