Software:Google Text-to-Speech

Short description: Screenreader

Google Text-to-Speech

Developer(s)	Google
Initial release	November 13, 2013 (2013-11-13)
Stable release	24.5.347911411 / January 8, 2021 (2021-01-08)
Operating system	Android
Size	around 37 MB
Type	Screen reader

Google Text-to-Speech is a screen reader application developed by Google for the Android operating system. It powers applications to read aloud (speak) the text on the screen with support for many languages. Text-to-Speech may be used by apps such as Google Play Books for reading books aloud, by Google Translate for reading aloud translations providing useful insight to the pronunciation of words, by Google Talkback and other spoken feedback accessibility-based applications, as well as by third-party apps. Users must install voice data for each language.

Supported languages

Google Text-to-Speech Android application

• Bengali (Bangladesh)
• Bengali (India)
• Cantonese (Hong Kong)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (Australia)
• English (India)
• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)
• Estonian
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French (Canadian)
• French (France)
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Javanese
• Khmer
• Korean
• Mandarin (China)
• Mandarin (Taiwan)
• Nepali
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Sinhala
• Slovak
• Spanish (Spain)
• Spanish (United States)
• Sundanese
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Uzbekistan
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech

• Afrikaans (South Africa)
• Arabic
• Bengali (India)
• Bulgarian (Bulgaria)
• Catalan (Spain)
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Czech (Czech Republic)
• Danish (Denmark)
• Dutch (Netherlands)
• English (Australia)
• English (India)
• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)
• Filipino (Philippines)
• Finnish (Finland)
• French (Canada)
• French (France)
• German (Germany)
• Gujarati (India)
• Hindi (India)
• Hungarian (Hungary)
• Icelandic (Iceland)
• Indonesian (Indonesia)
• Italian (Italy)
• Japanese (Japan)
• Kannada (India)
• Korean (South Korea)
• Latvian (Latvia)
• Malayalam (India)
• Mandarin (China)
• Norwegian (Norway)
• Polish (Poland)
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian (Romania)
• Russian (Russia)
• Serbian (Cyrillic)
• Slovak (Slovakia)
• Spanish (Spain)
• Spanish (United States)
• Swedish (Sweden)
• Tamil (India)
• Telugu (India)
• Thai (Thailand)
• Turkish (Turkey)
• Ukrainian (Ukraine)
• Vietnamese (Vietnam)

Evolution

Some app developers have started adapting and tweaking their Android Auto apps to include Text-to-Speech, such as Hyundai in 2015. Apps such as textPlus and WhatsApp use Text-to-Speech to read notifications aloud and provide voice-reply functionality.

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is powered by WaveNet, software created by Google's UK-based AI subsidiary DeepMind, which was bought by Google in 2014. It tries to distinguish from its competitors, Amazon and Microsoft, with distinct AI features.

DeepMind's AI voice synthesis tech is notably advanced and realistic. Most voice synthesizers (including Apple's Siri) use concatenative synthesis, in which a program stores individual phonemes and then pieces them together to form words and sentences. WaveNet instead uses machine learning to generate speech. It then waveforms from a database of human speech and re-creates them at a rate of 24,000 samples per second. The end result includes voices with subtleties like lip smacks and accents. When Google first unveiled WaveNet in 2016, it was too computationally intensive to work outside of research environments, but has since been slimmed down significantly, showing a clear pipeline from research to product.

See also

• Speech synthesis
• VoiceOver
• Live Transcribe