Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
One of the popular features of Google Translate is the ability to hear translations spoken out loud (”text-to-speech”) by clicking the speaker icon beside some translations, like the one below.
We rolled this feature out for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago and added French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer, eSpeak.
By integrating eSpeak we’re adding text-to-speech functionality for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.
So go ahead and give it a try! Click the on the speaker icon for any of these translations: “airport” in Greek, “lightning” in Chinese or “smile” in Swahili.
Posted by Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer
We rolled this feature out for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago and added French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer, eSpeak.
By integrating eSpeak we’re adding text-to-speech functionality for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.
So go ahead and give it a try! Click the on the speaker icon for any of these translations: “airport” in Greek, “lightning” in Chinese or “smile” in Swahili.
Posted by Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer
I still cannot see those on languages you just add. http://prntscr.com/clpq
ReplyDeleteWould those languages be available on Android devices also?
ReplyDeleteСаша Стефановић wrote:
ReplyDeleteI still cannot see those on languages you just add.
You probably still have the old translate.google.com page cached in your browser. You should reload the web page, making sure to bypass the browser cache.
Krzysztof Wolny wrote:
ReplyDeleteWould those languages be available on Android devices also?
Yes, most of those languages are available on Android devices, using the free "TTS Extended" application on the Android Market. There are a few exceptions: the current release of "TTS Extended" does not yet support Albanian, Catalan, Danish, or Latvian.
I means available in API, for other applications. After installation of TTS Extended my app that uses TTS still displays only 5 basic languages.
ReplyDeleteWhy not Bulgarian?
ReplyDeleteDimitar, I was just as surprised as you are, especially considering there's support for Macedonian and other less common languages. If you're interested in helping the developers add Bulgarian and provided you have some free time, you might want to read this: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html
ReplyDeleteVery useful !
ReplyDeleteI wish there was an open API for it, like the rest of google services
Will you add support for basque (euskara)?
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Krzysztof Wolny said...
ReplyDeleteI means available in API, for other applications. After installation of TTS Extended my app that uses TTS still displays only 5 basic languages.
You can change your application to work with TTS Extended. For example, the Google Translate application works with TTS Extended, and supports TTS for many more than five languages.
See the documentation on the TTS Extended site for details on how to do this.
Joxean Koret wrote:
ReplyDeleteWill you add support for basque (euskara)?
We're going to continue working on improving our TTS support for existing languages and adding new languages, but Basque might not be our first priority. However, eSpeak is open-source. I'm hoping that our use of eSpeak on translate.google.com will encourage the community to develop support for new languages in eSpeak. See the URL that Georgi listed:
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html.
Fergus Henderson wrote:
ReplyDelete"You can change your application to work with TTS Extended. For example, the Google Translate application works with TTS Extended, and supports TTS for many more than five languages."
I can't get the idea and differences of TTS from eyes-free and TTS build-in Android (from 1.6). They are in different packages, so I'm confused. What is (and will be) part of official Android API? Will eyes-free be a part of next Android TTS API? I'm really confused what should I use in my TTS enabled app. Should I use offical TTS Android API or libs from eyes-free? Someone can answer my questions? :)
I love google translate, it has been very valuable for me over the years, but I have to say the speaking part just doesn't cut it. The "airport" in Greek you reference is unintelligible really and doesn't actually reflect the real Greek.
ReplyDeleteThis is my ideal:
http://www.apptech.philips.com/tts/examples.html
When do you expect that Danish will be available for TTS for Android?
ReplyDeleteIt's my understanding, then, that the German text-to-speech currently in Google Translate is not using espeak. Is that correct? I'd love to help out with German (I am a native speaker) specifically for Google Translate. Is there a way to do this, or is that better done by volunteering with espeak?
ReplyDeletePiet wrote:
ReplyDeleteIt's my understanding, then, that the German text-to-speech currently in Google Translate is not using espeak. Is that correct?
Yes. The German TTS in translate.google.com uses the SVOX Pico speech synthesizer.
I'd love to help out with German (I am a native speaker) specifically for Google Translate. Is there a way to do this, or is that better done by volunteering with espeak?
Your enthusiasm is inspiring!
Although the C sources for the SVOX Pico synthesizer are publicly available under an open-source license (they are part of the Android source distribution), the language-specific parts are apparently machine-generated code that unfortunately will not be easy to modify. So I don't know if there is much you can do to help on that front. We'll continue to work on improving both quality and coverage for TTS.
Hi, adding languages is good but some additional functionalities could be useful for certain languages: In french and spanish, there are two forms of "you" (tu/vous and tu/usted). It would be great to be able to pick the one you want, with a tu/vous button next to the translated text for instance.
ReplyDeleteCool that you're supporting eSpeak =D but may I ask why not Festival? Is it just because eSpeak has more languages that you don't already get from SVOX Pico?
ReplyDeleteThe "hear" button not working
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the listening of the Catalan words is absolutely NOT Catalan! Totally useless...
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if, for example, i write a sentence in English to translate in French, but the sentence in English is not correct, so the translator suggests a correct sentence, like in the google search :)
ReplyDeleteHave a nice day!
Best wishes,
RoXiE
Dear Google,
ReplyDeleteAs a translator, so far I have always been impressed from the innovations of Google and favors you do regulary (putting celebration notices on Google Homepage), However this time I feel disappointed as there is no mention of International Translation Day, even on Google Translate Homepage or Blog...
Best,