Sweet Google TTS 0

Posted In Perl By John Hass

Google now has a text to speech service that allows you to type in a URL and some text and it will give you an mp3! It works fairly well, so I decided to use my Swiss Army knife (Perl) and write a script that will make it easy to get mp3’s

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP;
 
$speak = $ARGV[0];
 
if (length($speak) ==0 || length($speak) > 100) {
print "what you speak needs to be > 0 and <100\n";
exit;
}

This code will check to make sure that what we want to say follows with google standards. The program is called ./speak.pl “this is what I want to say”

my @headers1 = (
'Host' => 'translate.google.com',
'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091109 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.5',
'Accept' => 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Language' => 'en-us,en;q=0.5',
'Accept-Encoding' => 'gzip,deflate',
'Accept-Charset' => 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7',
'Keep-Alive' => '300',
'Connection' => 'keep-alive',
);
 
$browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

The above is our magic headers. This allows us to use Google and the browser instantiation.

next we need to format it so Google can see it correctly

$speak =~ s/ /+/g;

This removes all spaces and makes them +’s

lastly we connect and download

$sec = time();
$resp = $browser->get("http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=$speak",@headers1);
 
open(FILE,">$sec.mp3");
print FILE $resp->content;
close(FILE);
print "Wrote $sec.mp3\n";