How to convert text to speech using PHP

In this article, you will learn how to convert text to speech. The text to speech conversion process improves the customer experience. Many people like to listen instead of reading, like news articles, courses and much more. It helps to interact with users in multiple languages and tones. The website with TTS technology attracts most of the customers and increases the reach of your business. Text-to-Speech allows developers to create natural-sounding, synthetic human speech as playable audio. It permits you to convert your strings, words, sentences in the sound of a person(male/female).

There are several APIs available to convert text to speech. In this article, we will use the Google Text-To-Speech or gTTS module.

The gTTS module produces a very natural voice like a human while some other APIs provide voice like a robotic. It is freely available and easy to implement as it simply converts specified text into audio which we can save as an mp3 file. It has the capacity to read a long length of text with keeping proper intonation, abbreviations, decimals and more. This API also supports many languages including English, Hindi, French, German and much more.

First, create an 'index.php' file that we will call in the browser. In this file, we place a form element to collect text.

<form method="post">
<input id="txt" name="txt" type="textbox" />
<input name="submit" type="submit" value="Convert to Speech" />
</form>

The base url of google translator is -

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts

It has some predefined url attributes that accepts in GET requests, like -
q - The targeted text to convert to audio,
tl - Translation language, like en-IN for English India, fr for French, it for Italian and so on,
ie - Input Encoding format, use the default UTF-8,
oe - Output Encoding format.

Next, get the form value and find the special character if any in the form. After that, encode the text using rawurlencode(). Next, we will use the file_get_contents() to retrieve all the data from the gtts and store it in a variable.

<?php
if(isset($_POST['txt'])){
  $txt=$_POST['txt'];
  $txt=htmlspecialchars($txt);
  $txt=rawurlencode($txt);
  $audio=file_get_contents('https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=gtx&q='.$txt.'&tl=en-IN');
  $speech="<audio controls='controls' autoplay></audio>";
  echo $speech;
}
?>

The above code converts the given text into audio and displays something like this in the browser.

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