Text to speech (TTS) is the conversion of written text into spoken voice.You can create TTS programs in python. The quality of the spoken voice depends on your speech engine.

In this article you’ll learn how to create your own TTS program.

Related course: Complete Python Programming Course & Exercises

Text to speech in python

Example with espeak

The program ‘espeak’ is a simple speech synthesizer which converst written text into spoken voice. The espeak program does sound a bit robotic, but its simple enough to build a basic program.

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import subprocess

def execute_unix(inputcommand):
   p = subprocess.Popen(inputcommand, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
   (output, err) = p.communicate()
   return output

a = "Say something in natural language."

# create wav file
# w = 'espeak -w temp.wav "%s" 2>>/dev/null' % a  
# execute_unix(w)

# tts using espeak
c = 'espeak -ven+f3 -k5 -s150 --punct="<characters>" "%s" 2>>/dev/null' % a 
execute_unix(c)

TTS with Google

Google has a very natural sounding voices. You can use their TTS engine with the code below.
For this program you need the module gTTS installed as well as the program mpg123.

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# need gTTS and mpg123
# pip install gTTS
# apt install mpg123

from gtts import gTTS
import os

# define variables
s = "escape with plane"
file = "file.mp3"

# initialize tts, create mp3 and play
tts = gTTS(s, 'en')
tts.save(file)
os.system("mpg123 " + file)

This will output spoken voice / an mp3 file.

Related course: Complete Python Programming Course & Exercises