Tropo Speaks your Language – 24 in all
July 1st, 2011 by Adam KalseyTropo’s international support is one of the features people love best about us. Numbers in 41 countries, SMS delivery worldwide, and text to speech and speech recognition in 9 languages.
Wait, only nine languages? Surely we can do better.
Tropo can now speak and understand 17 new languages (for a total of 24) with speech recognition and text to speech in both male and female voices in Catalan, Danish, Finnish, Canadian French, Galacian (female only), Greek, Mandarin Chinese (female text to speech only), Norwegian (no speech recognition), Russian, Argentine Spanish (male only), Chilean Spanish, (female only), Portuguese, Brazilan Portuguese, Swedish, and Valencian.
We’ve added 14 new voices to existing languages. US English, UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Mexican Spanish all get new voices for you to play with.
These languages are available immediately in both our free developer accounts and production applications.
The Tropo documentation will always have a list of the current languages, voices, and recognition engines and is the best place to go for up-to-date information, but for convenience, here’s a list of all the languages and voices that are supported today.
| Language | Recognizer | Female voice | Male Voice |
|---|---|---|---|
| English (US) | en-us (default) | Allison (default), Susan, Vanessa | Dave, Steven, Victor |
| English (UK) | en-gb | Elizabeth, Kate | Simon |
| Catalan | ca-es | Montserrat | Jordi |
| Danish | da-dk | Frida | Magnus |
| Dutch | nl-nl | Saskia | Willem |
| Finnish | fi-fi | Milla | Mikko |
| French | fr-fr | Florence, Juliette | Bernard |
| French (Canadian) | fr-ca | Charlotte | Olivier |
| Galacian | gl-es | Carmela | |
| German | de-de | Katrin | Stefan |
| Greek | el-gr | Afroditi | Nikos |
| Italian | it-it | Giulia, Paola, Silvana, Valentina | Luca, Marcello, Matteo, Roberto |
| Mandarin Chinese | Linlin, Lisheng | ||
| Norwegian | Vilde | Henrik | |
| Polish | pl-pl | Zosia | Krzysztof |
| Russian | ru-ru | Olga | Dmitri |
| Spanish (Castilian) | es-es | Carmen, Leonor | Jorge, Juan |
| Spanish (Argentine) | es-ar | Diego | |
| Spanish (Chilean) | es-cl | Francisca | |
| Spanish (Mexican) | es-mx | Soledad, Ximena, Esperanza | Carlos |
| Portuguese | pt-pt | Amalia | Eusebio |
| Portuguese (Brazilian) | pt-br | Fernanda, Gabriela | Felipe |
| Swedish | sv-se | Annika | Sven |
| Valencian | x-va | Empar |
One thing to note is that if you use PHP, it does not handle unicode very well. This can lead to problems when using some voices in PHP in our scripting API, and is especially problematic when using multibyte languages like Chinese. We’re working with Quercus, our PHP engine, to try and improve the unicode support.
Tropo is only two and a half years old and can speak twenty-four languages. That’s one precocious toddler.
Related posts:
- International Male (Voices)
- Deutsch? French? Spanish? How To Use International Text-To-Speech (TTS) in Tropo Apps
- Simple tips for better text to speech
- Language Barrier Finally Broken!
- Tropo’s in Poland, so we’re speaking Polish
Tags: global, international, languages, PHP, speech recognition, tts
This is most certainly a welcome addition to the already excellent Tropo environment! I can’t wait to hear the new voices for myself – I just hope they’re of the same high standard as the English..
Hi Adam,
This is unbelievably cool. Time to add more voices to my app, under development. I’m putting this together with Google Translate, and some simple web services.
Ted
Google Translate shut down their API on Friday. Bing has a translation API, though.