In a large part my reason to start this speech recognition project was for home automation,  and to get some feedback from my home a logical companion project is the reverse of speech recognition: Text to Speech (TTS). The offline TTS on Android has quite a pleasant voice and seemed to be running on Chrome on Desktop as well, so it made a perfect combination with the recognition pipeline.

With the recognition project waiting for SODA to be released for Chrome, I had a bit of time to tackle this TTS, which turned out to be quite a bit easier, and definitely quicker!

I started with getting a copy of Chrome OS in a virtual machine, courtesy of neverware.com. Incidentally I also found a page in the Chrome source repo mentioning that the TTS part of Chrome OS can be downloaded separately.

After a weekend of getting ltrace running on chromeos, and tracing the calls to the googletts library, I wrote a tiny (~50 lines of C) client which pipes any Google voice (there are quite many languages available) to for example ALSA:

./gtts "Hello from Google Text to Speech!" | aplay -r22050 -fFLOAT_LE -c1

It's just a tiny proof of concept, which can easily be added to any C/C++ project out there. Also a python wrapper would be awesome, maybe I get to that someday (or maybe you want to pick that up?). Code lives on github, if you decide to use it don't forget to leave a comment below!