14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been working very hard lately to “make the world’s information universally accessible,“ with the emphasis on ‘universally.‘ Its translation technologies and services have been evolving constantly. Translation is being integrated into various other Google products, but the main tool, Google Translate, is not being ignored. The text-to-speech feature introduced a few months ago has proven pretty popular and it has now been extended to a much greater number of languages.
“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,” Fergus Henderson, software engineer at Google, announced.
eSpeak is an open-source library and piece of software that provides voice synthesis. Unlike more advanced, commercial tools that use voice recording to reconstruct the words, eSpeak ‘generates’ the speech. This makes it a lightweight alternative, but the voice will sound more ‘robotic.’
“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,” Henderson warned.
Google introduced a new version of the Google Translate page late last year. The biggest addition consisted of real-time translations enabling users to get their answer as they were typing the words they wanted translated. But it also marked the introduction of the ability to hear how the translation sounded, pronounced correctly. It was only available for English at the time, but more languages were added later on.
With the addition of the eSpeak technology, the text-to-speech feature in Google Translate now supports these new languages: 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. There are now 34 supported languages in total.