Google Translate (TTS)
Hi guys,
great to see the new Audio Notification API. I tested it but can't get it working with Google Translate. I think it's because you are sending not a proper Agent information when retrieving the data from Google Translate.
Here is the URL I tried:
Would be great if you could send some generic agent string like "Mozilla Agent..." to get it working. I assume that's the problem.
As long as the Notification API was not there, I had two more feature in place which were great and maybe you could implement them as well.
relative volume (+10 => increase current volume level by 10)
off after speak (power off the speaker after the notification)
Would be great if you could help me at least with the Google Translate, as that is a very important feature in home automation for the users. As long as that is not in place, I unfortunately can't use the new API.
Thanks,
Dominik
Comments
Hi Dominik,
This is a known issue, but there is a workaround! Encode your translate url as XML, and it should work. So, the link you posted would instead become:
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=de&client=tw-ob&q=Das ist ein SoundTouch Test
I created that using this tool, which may be helpful for prototyping. The root cause of this we believe is the speaker not playing well with unencoded '&' symbols. If this doesn't work let me know and we can investigate further.
Thanks for the quick reply. I replaced all & with & and now it's working
Great!
Could it be that the first word is a little bit quieter than the rest? I think its some kind of slow volume increase instead of starting at full volume.
Glad it is now working! We have heard intermittent reports about the first word starting quietly; this may be unavoidable in the current architecture, but we'll be looking into it further as a potential future improvement.
How are you achieving this? I just get "media referenced by url is not supported by speaker" for Google TTS just because the URL doesn't end in mp3. Surely the API should look at the Content-Type header and not the URL ending....
Hi TimDonovan,
Can you share the URL you are using, so I might be able to better help troubleshoot? It definitely does not need to end in .mp3 -- as noted in my above post from 12/10/2017, there are some encoding tricks with the URL to consider, but there's an example of a working translate.google.com TTS URL in that post which does not end in any media extension.
Hey Zach thanks for getting back so quickly. Actually I just noticed what happened - the XML formatted URL you posted got reverted back (I guess the forum strips xml encoding) to be identical to the one dominikk posted. So even though I copied your google translate link it was not XML formatted. I've run it through the encoding tool and it's working now. Thank you
Glad it is working now!! I had not realized that I had ended up posting the same link... I think it did have to do with the forum re-encoding upon posting. I edited the post above to remedy that! Thanks much for the tip.