Search code examples
pythontext-to-speech

gTTS direct output


I want to make a chatbot's response in audio and text.

All the example code using gTTS seem like one needs to 'save the text into a file then play the file'.

Is there another way to simplify the process such as, play the 'response from chatbot' automatically, using gTTS?


Solution

  • If you look even briefly at the docs, you'll see that, of the three examples, only one of them requires you to call save, and the third one is specifically called "Playing sound directly".

    So, just do exactly what's in that example, but substitute your string in place of the literal 'hello':

    >>> from gtts import gTTS
    >>> from io import BytesIO
    >>>
    >>> my_variable = 'hello' # your real code gets this from the chatbot
    >>> 
    >>> mp3_fp = BytesIO()
    >>> tts = gTTS(my_variable, 'en')
    >>> tts.write_to_fp(mp3_fp)
    

    But notice that gTTS doesn't come with an MP3 player; you need a separate audio library to play that mp3_fp buffer:

    >>> # Load `audio_fp` as an mp3 file in
    >>> # the audio library of your choice
    

    As the docs say, there are many such libraries, and Stack Overflow is not a good place to get recommendations for libraries. I happen to have a library installed, named musicplayer, and a sample app that can be easily adapted here, but it's probably not the simplest one by a long shot (it's made for doing more powerful, low-level stuff):

    >>> import musicplayer
    >>> class Song:
    ...     def __init__(self, f):
    ...         self.f = f
    ...     def readPacket(self, size):
    ...         return self.f.read(size)
    ...     def seekRaw(self, offset, whence):
    ...         self.f.seek(offset, whence)
    ...         return f.tell()
    >>> player = musicplayer.createPlayer()
    >>> player.queue = [Song(mp3_fp)]
    >>> player.playing = True