Google's text-to speech engine voices?

text-to-speech google-translate speech-synthesis espeak machine-translation
Stefan Steiger picture Stefan Steiger · Oct 27, 2010 · Viewed 24.1k times · Source

Most of you probably know the text-to-speech synthesizer of google translate, as you can access programmatically here btw:

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text

My impression was it's sometimes using espeak, but in the major languages, the quality is much better than that. Anybody knows what Google is using, or what voices they are using? Clearly it's not the normal and also not the mbrola espeak voices.

Answer

Maxim Gueivandov picture Maxim Gueivandov · Jan 17, 2011

I would look in the list of Google acquisitions
(Wikipedia, list of google acquisitions):

84 December 3, 2010 Phonetic Arts Speech synthesis  UK Google Voice, Google Translate [90]

Related questions

Google translate text-to-speech in British

I'm using the (unofficial) Google translate TTS api to retrieve mp3s to support disabled learners to read web pages. It all works fine, however we have an American accent (we're in the UK!). When I use Google translate however, …

Read More
Can I change the voice of Google Translate in different gender?

Through some excellent answers I know I can get the MP3 file from text input by using the following URL with properties: http://www.translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=zh-TW&q=我要吃餅乾 But the voice on the MP3 is …

Read More
How to use Google Translate TTS with the new V2 API?

I used to call Google Translate TTS to download an audio file using this url: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello+world! However Google changed the way that works and therefore I can no longer …

Read More