tts_google.py

import urllib2
import urllib
import time
import os


def speak(text='hello', lang='en', fname='result.wav', player=None):
    """ Sends text to Google's text to speech service
    and returns created speech (wav file). """

    limit = min(100, len(text))#100 characters is the current limit.
    text = text[0:limit]
    print "Text to speech:", text
    url = "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts"
    values = urllib.urlencode({"q": text, "textlen": len(text), "tl": lang})
    hrs = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7"}
    #TODO catch exceptions
    req = urllib2.Request(url, data=values, headers=hrs)
    p = urllib2.urlopen(req)
    f = open(fname, 'wb')
    f.write(p.read())
    f.close()
    print "Speech saved to:", fname
    if player is not None:
        play_wav(fname, player)


def play_wav(filep, player='mplayer'):
    ''' Plays filep using player '''
    print "Playing %s file using %s" % (filep, player)
    try:
        os.system(player + " " + filep)
    except:
        print "Couldn't use %s to play file" % (player)


if(__name__ == '__main__'):
    speak("Hello world. The time is %s" % (time.strftime('%H %M')), 'mplayer')