Google changed once again the way their translate_TTS service works 🙁

Having trawled the interweb for an answer, having even signed up for an API key on the new Google Translate API V2, it’s just become impossible to download the text-to-speech audio files.

I have tried various free TTS options – see previous post here – and none were really “fit for purpose” as they really sounded metallic computerised voices, but I’ve just found Voice RSS.

Now Voice RSS is really nowhere as good as Google’s TTS quality, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably the next best thing, especially as it can be used almost as a direct replacement using wget.

You’ll have to sign up for an API key first, but provided you need less than 350 requests / day (with each request being smaller than 100kb), it’s free 🙂

The command goes as follows:

http://api.voicerss.org/?key=[your API Key]&hl-en-gb&r=1&f=48khz_16bit_stereo&src=hello+world

It’s also a bit slower than Google to return the audio files so I’ll probably review my commands to do the complete download and play them all one after the other.