We can make the computer speak with Python.

Given a text string, it will speak the written words in the English language.
This process is called Text To Speech (TTS).

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Text to speech

Pyttsx text to speech

Pytsx is a cross-platform text-to-speech wrapper.
It uses different speech engines based on your operating system:

Install with pip (using pyenv, pipenv or virtualenv):

sudo pip install pyttsx

Then run the example code:

import pyttsx
engine = pyttsx.init()
engine.say('Good morning.')
engine.runAndWait()

gTTS text to speech

gTTS is a module and command line utility to save spoken text to mp3.
It uses the Google Text to Speech (TTS) API.

Listen to the voice sample below:

Related Course: The Complete Machine Learning Course with Python

This module supports many languages and sounds very natural.

Install
Install with the python package tool (pip):

sudo pip install gTTS

Example

from gtts import gTTS
import os
tts = gTTS(text='Good morning', lang='en')
tts.save("good.mp3")
os.system("mpg321 good.mp3")

If you want to test it on the command line use:

gtts-cli.py "Hello" -l 'en' -o hello.mp3

iOS TTS and speech recognition

TTS in Pythonista for iOS:

import speech
speech.say('Hola mundo', 'es_ES')

To record sound:

import sound

r = sound.Recorder('audio.m4a')
r.record(3)  # seconds
 

To recognize it as text:

text = speech.recognize('audio.m4a', 'en')[0][0]  # sent to Apple servers

Microsoft speech engine

If you use Microsoft Windows 10, it has a speech engine included.
Install the module win32com, then you can use this code:

import win32com.client as wincl
speak = wincl.Dispatch("SAPI.SpVoice")
speak.Speak("Hello World")

IBM Watson TTS

IBM has created an tts API, which is free for a limited amount of queries.

You can listen to sample data on the Watson TTS page.

You can use the tts-watson module to interact.

pip install tts-watson

After registrating on the IBM watson site (generate keys there),
we can write our code:

 
from tts_watson.TtsWatson import TtsWatson

ttsWatson = TtsWatson('watson_user', 'watson_password', 'en-US_AllisonVoice') 
ttsWatson.play("Hello World")
 

Alternatively you can use curl to directly fetch from the API.

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