How to Use Google Text to Speech API

June 26, 2021

Google offers an undocumented text to speech API that help you transform text into voice. You can see a live demo at labnol.org/listen.

The following snippet of PHP code is responsible for the conversion while the MP3 files are cached to reduce requests to Google Translation servers.

<?php

// Convert Words (text) to Speech (MP3)
// ------------------------------------

// Google Translate API cannot handle strings > 100 characters
   $words = substr($_GET['words'], 0, 100);

// Replace the non-alphanumeric characters
// The spaces in the sentence are replaced with the Plus symbol
   $words = urlencode($_GET['words']);

// Name of the MP3 file generated using the MD5 hash
   $file  = md5($words);

// Save the MP3 file in this folder with the .mp3 extension
   $file = "audio/" . $file . ".mp3";

// If the MP3 file exists, do not create a new request
   if (!file_exists($file)) {
     $mp3 = file_get_contents(
        'http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=' . $words;
     file_put_contents($file, $mp3);
   }
?>

Embed the MP3 file using the AUDIO tag of HTML5.

<audio controls="controls" autoplay="autoplay">
  <source src="<? echo $file; ?>" type="audio/mp3" />
</audio>

Google Text to Speech - Command Line

You can also convert any piece of text to MP3 files from the command line using the wget or CURL command. Remember that the value of “q” parameter should have less than 100 characters else the Google Translate TTS API will throw an error.

wget -q -U Mozilla -O audio.mp3 "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=en&q=hello+world

curl -A "Mozilla" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hello+world" > audio.mp3

PHP

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Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory