Simple Text To Speech Converter

This is a really simple but effective way to convert text files to mp3 audio files.

Usage

You can use a script like this to convert a text document – like a book – into a spoken audio file. The intonation isn’t quite like a real human, but even so, it’s pretty good and it costs nothing and takes moments to do!

Prerequisites

You will need to install the “edge TTS” and “pydub” libraries.

pip install edge-tts

pip install pydub

How to use it

1. Save the script below in the folder of your choice
2. Rename the file you want to convert to audio as “test.txt” and save it in the same folder as the script
3. Run the script
4. The audio file is saved as “output.mp3”

# Install  using "pip install edge-tts" and "pip install pydub"


import asyncio
import edge_tts

async def main():
    # Read text
    with open('test.txt', 'rb') as f:
        data = f.read()

    text = data.decode('latin-1')

    voice = "en-GB-LibbyNeural"
    
    rate = +50
    outputFile = "output.mp3"

    communicate = edge_tts.Communicate(text, voice,)
    await communicate.save(outputFile)

loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())
loop.close()

print("Text saved to audio file")

There are a few settings you can adjust:

1) The voice: this script uses “Libby”, a UK accented female voice. At the end of this post I provide the complete list of Edge TTS voices: just replace “en-GB-LibbyNeural” with your preferred voice
2) Reading speed: you can adjust this using the “rate=” line. In this case, the speed is 50% faster than nominal. Try different settings and see how the reading speed changes.

Edge TTS Voices

How to read the voice labels:
EXAMPLE: en-IN-NeerjaNeural, Gender: Female
en – means the voice speaks English
IN – means the accent is Indian