aiTTS – Google Wavenet Voices for Android TTS
Google TTS Wavenet voices for Android (Text to speech engine).
I read a lot of ebooks. The problem is that I get tired easily. Listening to ebooks is better for me. I use Google Books Text to speech feature all the time. It works nice, but the voices are terrible.
I even bought some premium TTS engines like from Acapela. It is bearable but lets get stright. These voices still sound like robots. OK for navigation apps but annoying for ebooks.
High Quality TTS Voices from Google
Google has a TTS API where you can use some of the best sounding TTS voices for Android I’ve ever heard. These voices are the result of artificial intelligence engineering (called WaveNet). The problem is: these voices are not available on your phone (yet?).
Creating my own Android TTS engine for Google WaveNet
If you can’t find something, just create it. So I did. I created a small TTS engine for Android which will read anything on your phone using the awesome Google TTS voices!
Download?
The app is not available at Google Playstore for now.
How does it work?
At first, get a Google TTS API key. Now open your Android TTS Settings and change the default TTS engine to aiTTS. Now open the aiTTS settings and click on “Google API Key” and insert your Google TTS API key.
You can then use any app, eg. Google Play Books to read aloud ebooks. Or use it whenever you want. Here is a quick demo:
Be aware…
… the Google TTS voices are only free for the first 4 million characters for “standard” voices (not as good as the WaveNet voices) and 1 million characters for the awesome WaveNet voices. I listen a lot of ebooks and I still didn’t fill up my quota -- but keep an eye on these stats (in the Google API Console) Speaking for myself, I am gladly willing to pay for these voices to have a high quality voice on my device.
Another thing: the aiTTS is a network only TTS engine. It sends http requests to Google and downloads a small audio file for each request (usually a sentence). So keep this in mind if you are using it.
Feedback
If you have questions or some feedback, don’t hestiate to contact me.
Updates
18 April 2020 -- Version 1.0.5 : a small fix. No new features. The link to the apk is the same. This will hopefully fix some crashes. I am still testing it on multiple devices using various testing services like browserstack. It is hard to fix because “it works on my devices” and I rarely find a device that will crash using the tts.
Please give me feedback if it works! 🙂
What exactly should I put into “Google API Key”? The content of JSON file? Only the private key?
only the key. The key looks something like this this:
I wish it could be easier (eg just sign in with your google account but unfortunately thats not possible yet)
Hey. I tried using it and your tts app keeps on crashing. I’ve been using wavenet tts voices via Tasker before so I know that the API key I entered works. I’m not sure why your tts engine is crashing… Any ideas? I’m on pixel 2 XL.
hi, sorry! I could reproduce the crashes. Please get an update from play store, it should work now (I hope!)
I cannot find the app on the Google store, was it removed? Can you post the apk?
I removed it from play store as some users couldn’t make it work on their machines – and I couldn’t reproduce it. Downlaod it here https://milmike.com/downloads/aitts/aitts.apk – Please give me a feedback if it works. Good luck!
Hi, the link to the play store no longer brings up your app and I can’t find it via a search in the play store. How can I get this still?
I’m desperate to find any kind of solutions for a wavenet TTS reader for all the ebooks I go through.
Hi, I removed it from the playstore as it received bad ratings only 🙁 because it didn’t work on their devices. And I couldn’t reproduce it. So, if you want to try it on your device, you can download the apk here: https://milmike.com/downloads/aitts/aitts.apk
This doesn’t appear to still be available on the Play Store anymore. Would you be willing to send me a copy?
You can download the apk here: https://milmike.com/downloads/aitts/aitts.apk
Downloaded the apk, installed just fine. Plugged in my google ts API key (I know it works, I used it for chrome wavenet TTS).
I can select said language (the app works fine) but whenever tts is enabled (after switching to primary in settings) and activating the tts engine (by clicking test button or doing something on my phone that activates tts) results in a crash and no text spoken.
“aiTTS keeps stopping” and links me to app info which doesnt give any information. I enabled storage permissions to see if that helped but it didnt do anything
Device: Samsung Galaxy s10+
Sad to see no new updates on this project. I have a learning disability and have been so hopeful for engine TTS integration into android so I can have my favorite reader apps read to me in WaveNet voices. Also there is nothing like it for iOS. I also tried to install this on my pixel XL and it didn’t work either, same problem with the crashing
I will see what I can do. I plan to add it to the play store again but it needs to be properly tested. Unfortunately I am not an ios developer so I can’t help here.
Please keep working on this. I love where you are going with this. I wish Google would have already integrated Wavenet into Android Select to Speak and Play Books.
yeah I also wish this was a built in TTS. I basically listen to all my ebooks using this engine. I want to work on it but I can’t test it properly, if it really works. Because “it works for me” I can’t reproduce any of the mentioned problems, not on VM nor on multiple phones with different android version. I will see what I can do. I wish more people could use it because it is so good (if it works)
Will you release the source? I want to get this running and I don’t feel like writing a version of it myself.
I just uploaded a new version with a small fix. (Download link is the same) Not sure if it will help on your device but give feedback please.
If it doesn’t work tell me which device you are using. I know there are 2 causes of crash on some machines. I fixed one.
It is hard to fix the bug because all my devices do not cause any crashes. I am testing now using browserstack and some other service, there I could see some crashes.
Not sure about the open source. I was thinking about it and I will probably release it soon. – but not sure yet.