May 12, 2010 by Andre Jackson
Google’s Translate service has become increasingly popular this year, especially the feature that allows the user to hear translations spoken out loud (“text to speech”) by clicking on the speaker icon that appears along side some translations.
Google released this feature for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago to help with the on-going charitable efforts in Haiti. A few weeks ago they added German, Italian, Hindi, French and Spanish to the mix, covering many of the most popular languages spoken worldwide.
This week Google announced on their official blog that they are now bringing text to speech technology to even more languages with their open source speech synthesizer ‘eSpeak’.
By integrating eSpeak Google are adding text to speech functionality for the following 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.
Google have stated that users may notice that the audio quality of these new languages is not quite at the same level as the previously released languages.
Clear and accurate speech technology is quite difficult to perfect according to Google but they have promised that they will be improving performance and the number of languages that are supported.
Google Translate is available direct from the revamped Google homepage.
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