Build a Text to Speech Service with Python Flask Framework
Siddhesh Shankar
Posted on September 26, 2020
Text-to-speech technology reads aloud digital text. It can take words on computers, smartphones, tablets etc and convert them into audio. Python comes with a lot of handy and easily accessible libraries and I am going to show you how we can deliver text-to-speech with Python using pyttsx3. pyttsx3 is a text-to-speech conversion library in Python. Unlike alternative libraries, it works offline, and is compatible with both Python 2 and 3. It is easy to use the library which converts the text entered, into an audio.
Checkout the video
Steps:
- Application invokes the pyttsx3.init() factory function to get a reference to a pyttsx3.Engine instance.
- getProperty('rate') method helps you to set the current speaking rate.
- Similarly, getProperty('volume') helps you to set the volume (min=0 and max=1)
- voice is string identifier of the active voice.
- runAndWait() blocks while processing all currently queued commands. Invokes callbacks for engine notifications appropriately. Returns when all commands queued before this call are emptied from the queue. ## Code for converting Text to Speech ```Javascript
import pyttsx3
def text_to_speech(text, gender):
"""
Function to convert text to speech
:param text: text
:param gender: gender
:return: None
"""
voice_dict = {'Male': 0, 'Female': 1}
code = voice_dict[gender]
engine = pyttsx3.init()
# Setting up voice rate
engine.setProperty('rate', 125)
# Setting up volume level between 0 and 1
engine.setProperty('volume', 0.8)
# Change voices: 0 for male and 1 for female
voices = engine.getProperty('voices')
engine.setProperty('voice', voices[code].id)
engine.say(text)
engine.runAndWait()
1. Create a text that you want to convert into audio.
2. Select voice assistant.
```Javascript
text = 'Hello ! My name is Siddhesh.'
gender = 'Male' # Voice assistant
text_to_speech(text, gender)
Building a Web Service
This is a basic flask application with the default route. We also need to import specific flask libraries and a few other libraries as shown below:
# Importing the necessary Libraries
from flask_cors import cross_origin
from flask import Flask, render_template, request
from main import text_to_speech
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/', methods=['POST', 'GET'])
@cross_origin()
def homepage():
if request.method == 'POST':
text = request.form['speech']
gender = request.form['voices']
text_to_speech(text, gender)
return render_template('frontend.html')
else:
return render_template('frontend.html')
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run(port=8000, debug=True)
HTML Template Code
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge" />
<title>Browser voices</title>
<style type="text/css">
* {
box-sizing: border-box;
}
html,
body {
min-height: 100vh;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
body {
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
color: #0d122b;
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
padding-left: 1em;
padding-right: 1em;
}
h1 {
text-align: center;
font-weight: 100;
}
header {
border-bottom: 1px solid #0d122b;
margin-bottom: 2em;
}
main {
flex-grow: 2;
display: flex;
justify-content: space-around;
align-items: center;
background-color: #fff;
border-radius: 12px;
margin-bottom: 2em;
}
@keyframes bg-pulse {
0% {
background-color: #fff;
}
50% {
background-color: #c7ecee;
}
100% {
backgrouond-color: #fff;
}
}
main.speaking {
animation: bg-pulse 1.5s alternate ease-in-out infinite;
}
.input {
text-align: center;
width: 100%;
}
label {
display: block;
font-size: 18px;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
.field {
margin-bottom: 2em;
}
input {
font-size: 24px;
padding: 0.5em;
border: 1px solid rgba(13, 18, 43, 0.25);
border-radius: 6px;
width: 75%;
display: inline-block;
transition: border-color 0.25s;
text-align: center;
}
input:focus,
select:focus {
border-color: rgba(13, 18, 43, 1);
}
select {
width: 75%;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 0.5em;
border: 1px solid rgba(13, 18, 43, 0.25);
border-radius: 6px;
transition: border-color 0.25s;
}
button {
font-size: 18px;
font-weight: 200;
padding: 1em;
width: 200px;
background: transparent;
border: 4px solid #f22f46;
border-radius: 4px;
transition: all 0.4s ease 0s;
cursor: pointer;
color: #f22f46;
margin-bottom: 2em;
}
button:hover,
button:focus {
background: #f22f46;
color: #fff;
}
a {
color: #0d122b;
}
.error {
color: #f22f46;
text-align: center;
}
footer {
border-top: 1px solid #0d122b;
text-align: center;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<header>
<h1>Text to Speech</h1>
</header>
<main>
<form class="input" id="voice-form" method="post">
<div class="field">
<label for="speech">Type Something</label>
<input type="text" name="speech" id="speech" required />
</div>
<div class="field">
<label for="voices">Choose a Voice Assistant</label>
<select name="voices" id="voices">
<option value="Male">Male</option>
<option value="Female">Female</option>
</select>
</div>
<button>
Say it!
</button>
</form>
</main>
<footer>
<p>
Built by <a href=<BLOG LINK>><YOUR NAME></a>
</p>
</footer>
</body>
</html>
There are several APIs available to convert text to speech in python. gTTS can also be used for doing the same task. It is python library and CLI tool to interface with Google translate's text-to-speech API.
I hope you found this post useful. This will help end-users to build a web application using flask and convert text to speech.
Octocat will take you to my GitHub repository...
Posted on September 26, 2020
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