Google Adds to Its TTS Engine

Google has updated its text-to-speech engine with new languages and several high-quality voices.

Google Text-to-Speech version 3 brings news languages and higher-quality voices for U.S. and U.K. English. The U.S. English version now offers a high-quality female voice in addition to a regular female voice. The U.K. version now offers high-quality male and female voices, as well as a new male voice.

The higher-quality voices, the company says, will result in more natural-sounding speech with smoother enunciation and intonations. The one drawback to these new high-quality voices, however, is the file size: They weigh in at 244 megabytes versus just 6.8 megabytes for the regular versions.

Google also added support for Brazilian Portuguese and U.S. Spanish, bringing the total number of languages to nine: German, U.S. and U.K. English, U.S. and European Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. Only the U.S. and U.K. English versions have the high-quality voice packs for now.