Multilanguage Google TTS sentence

Question

I am experimenting with google cloud TTS service and i was wondering if multi language text synthesization is supported.

Specifically i am trying to synthesize a sentence containing Greek and English words. I tried slicing the sentence to single language only parts but the voices used for each language sound quite bit off, any known workaround?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Yes. Both Google TTS and Amazon Polly allow to mix different languages-voices in the same audio sequence (Multilingual audio stream).

Amazon goes a bit further with some truly bilingual voices.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/bilingual-voices.html

For Google TTS, you need to use SSML and you have examples here

https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml#voice

---

In my experience, both (Google/Amazon) have 2 ways:

1. The native voice in language A tries to speak language B with 'some degree' of skill, but you can really feel the A-accent.
2. Switch voices, and speak each part with a native voice. In this way you do have 2 different voices, but each one speaks perfectly, all the in the same audio output.

(Python)

Example of 1: (google tts)

ssml_text = '''
<speak>Here is some English text.
<lang xml:lang="es-ES">Y nos dieron las diez y la una ...</lang></speak>
'''

Example of 2: (google tts)

ssml_text = '''
<speak>And there it was 

<voice name="en-GB-Wavenet-B">
a flying bird 
</voice>

<voice  name="es-ES-Wavenet-B">
Un chamaco muy revoltoso que no para de reirse.
</voice>

<voice  name="fr-FR-Wavenet-B">
Je ne parle pas français.
</voice>

</speak>
'''

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Here you can practice a bit ( https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech ) [updated 2024-09-02] -> https://console.cloud.google.com/speech/text-to-speech

But just a bit, because if your SSML text is too complex, it gets simplified (see in the picture upper vs lower text).

---

Luckily Google has extensive documentation and here you can find the code to practice/experiment.

https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml-tutorial