There seems to be no small number of TTS (text to speech) engines on the web, including Google’s translation feature itself. Also, there is a number of tools accessing the engines, letting us download the artificially created speech as audio files. Alas, Google imposed a barrier a while ago which makes it hard to impossible to do so.
Does anybody know a tool that goes around the restrictions? (tested solutions only, please).
And because I think nothing really will come up, how can I manually download a file when I use the translation tool? There is sadly no “save as” button. I’m no stranger to the developer tools of Chrome/FF if that helps.
@Morgengrauen ~ whenever I need a Google TTS audio file, I use this site: http://soundoftext.com/. It works like a charm every time. Just use the drop down list for your language of choice, and input or paste the word, character or phrase you are looking to translate and out it pops. You can listen to it and save it as an mp3 (which can be easily uploaded into Memrise).
Even though Google keeps changing (and restricting access to) their TTS option, this site continues to work. I guess the creator is maintaining it quite regularly.
This is what I use. They also have a way of doing this programmatically if you are able to program. By example, all you need to do is go to this url:
http://soundoftext.com/static/sounds/en/hello.mp3
The en should be changed to the language code. en stands for English. You can find this by watching how the url changes in google translate when you click on different languages. The hello should be changed to be whatever you want to translate.
As I understand it, however, this might not be useful to you since you are learning Bengali and soundoftext.com does not support that language. For that, I’m sorry I don’t know how to help you.
Got onto it straightaway. Thanks to @DrewSSP’s script and this website http://soundoftext.com/, I have now completed both my HSK courses for French beginners.
It’s true, the page “Sound of Text” is quite cool, I’d found it myself before.
Alas, this website doesn’t offer access to all languages which Google TTS currently supports. I already wrote an email to the creator yesterday, asking to update the list. Nobody can know if that will happen, but let’s hope.
Regarding downloading a file directly from the Google interface, I got some advice from my coworkers this morning!
Here’s how it works:
The example browser is Chrome, but it should work with any browser that offers some developer tool functions.
Open the dev tools (e.g. by pressing the shortcut, or doing a right-click, then chosing “inspect”)
From the available tabs on top select “Network”
The view changes and a second row of tabs appears a bit below the first. Select now “Media”
If you haven’t pressed the speaker icon yet, the left-hand column in the Media tab will be empty. For each time you press the speaker icon, one text line appears in there.
Right-click it and chose “Open Link in new Tab”
The new tab has only the audio file inside that you can play. Press your “Save” shortcut or select “Save page as” from the browser menu, and you’re done!
P.S. It is possible that you don’t have the dev tools enabled and you won’t see an “Inspect” option when you right-click in your browser. The dev tools can be enabled somehow but since I already have them I fail to see how
They open when I chose “View” from the browser menu and then chose “Developer” at the end of the list, in that menu is “Developer Tools”.
Thanks a lot, Morgengrauen
btw, I wonder how to increase the length of the speech? I type a quote with over 200 characters and it is automatically separated into 2 audio file.
