Convert Text to Speech Using PHP – Easiest Method

In this simple tutorial – We gonna convert Text into speech using PHP –  So let’s check out:

In this method we gonna use Google Translate’s text to Speech API.

Note: This tutorial is for informational and Educational Purposes only.   And it works for 100 Characters only.

 

Base URL: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts
It converts written words into audio. It accepts GET requests.

q
The query string to convert to audio

tl
Translation language, for example, en-IN for English (India), or en-us for English(USA)

ie
Encoding format, use the default UTF-8

For Eg: https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=gtx&q=Hello%20+%20How%20&tl=en-IN

 

Note: The value of the “q” parameter should have less than 100 characters else the Google Translate TTS API will throw an error.

So let’s start

– Open up your favorite code editor and create a form

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

Here, we are using the POST method in form, as we gonna need it later on to fetch the submitted text value

Moving on to the next step :-

Let’s fetch the form value using PHP and find special characters in the value (if any) using ” htmlspecialchars “

<?php
if(isset($_POST['txt'])){
  $txt=$_POST['txt'];
  $txt=htmlspecialchars($txt);

?>

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

after this let’s encode the converted $txt using “rawurlencode”  so, that it can be used in the API

<?php
if(isset($_POST['txt'])){
  $txt=$_POST['txt'];
  $txt=htmlspecialchars($txt);
  $txt=rawurlencode($txt);
?>
<form method="post"><input id="txt" name="txt" type="textbox" />
<input name="submit" type="button" value="Convert to speech" /></form>

Now lets retrieve the data and convert it into audio using the Google Translate

<?php
if(isset($_POST['txt'])){
  $txt=$_POST['txt'];
  $txt=htmlspecialchars($txt);
  $txt=rawurlencode($txt);
  $html=file_get_contents('https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=gtx&q='.$txt.'&tl=en-IN');
?>
<form method="post"><input id="txt" name="txt" type="textbox" />
<input name="submit" type="button" value="Convert to speech" /></form>

here “file_get_contents”  will retrieve all the data from the url    ( https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=gtx&q=’.$txt.’&tl=en-IN) and will pass into $html

Now, after this we will convert all the data which we got from url into audio using <audio> </audio> tags and then echo out the player

<?php
if(isset($_POST['txt'])){
  $txt=$_POST['txt'];
  $txt=htmlspecialchars($txt);
  $txt=rawurlencode($txt);
  $html=file_get_contents('https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=gtx&q='.$txt.'&tl=en-IN');
  $player="<audio controls='controls' autoplay><source src='data:audio/mpeg;base64,".base64_encode($html)."'></audio>";
  echo $player;
?>
<form method="post"><input id="txt" name="txt" type="textbox" />
<input name="submit" type="button" value="Convert to speech" /></form>

 

here, we set audio to auto play and used base64 encoder in( $player=“<audio controls=’controls’ autoplay><source src=’data:audio/mpeg;base64,”.base64_encode($html).“‘></audio>”;)

and its all done.