Hi artisan! In this article, I’m going to share how to convert text to speech without storing it as an mp3 file in Python. It’ll work in offline. Let’s get started:

Table of Contents

1. Install Package
2. Usage
3. Available TTS Engines

Install Package

We’ll convert text to speech using the pyttsx3 package. Run this command to install it:

pip install pyttsx3

Usage

Single line usage:

import pyttsx3
pyttsx3.speak("I will speak this text")

Basic usage:

import pyttsx3
engine = pyttsx3.init()
engine.say("I will speak this text")
engine.runAndWait()

Changing voice, rate and volume:

import pyttsx3
engine = pyttsx3.init() # object creation

""" RATE"""
rate = engine.getProperty('rate')   # getting details of current speaking rate
print (rate)                        #printing current voice rate
engine.setProperty('rate', 125)     # setting up new voice rate

"""VOLUME"""
volume = engine.getProperty('volume')   #getting to know current volume level (min=0 and max=1)
print (volume)                          #printing current volume level
engine.setProperty('volume',1.0)    # setting up volume level  between 0 and 1

"""VOICE"""
voices = engine.getProperty('voices')       #getting details of current voice
#engine.setProperty('voice', voices[0].id)  #changing index, changes voices. o for male
engine.setProperty('voice', voices[1].id)   #changing index, changes voices. 1 for female

engine.say("Hello World!")
engine.say('My current speaking rate is ' + str(rate))
engine.runAndWait()
engine.stop()

"""Saving Voice to a file"""
# On linux make sure that 'espeak' and 'ffmpeg' are installed
engine.save_to_file('Hello World', 'test.mp3')
engine.runAndWait()

Available TTS Engines

The library supports the following engines:

• sapi5 – SAPI5 on Windows
• nsss – NSSpeechSynthesizer on Mac OS X
• espeak – eSpeak on every other platform

We can specify engine like:

pyttsx3.init(driverName='sapi5')

That’s it. Thanks for reading.