How to listen to IBM Watson Text To Speech result without saving to a file (python)

Question

I am writing a simple python program that gets a text file then uses IBM Watson Text To Speech to convert it to audio then play the audio directly using a module such as playsound.

most of the tutorials shows you how to save the result to a file only and not how to pass it so a module to play the audio

from ibm_watson import TextToSpeechV1
from ibm_cloud_sdk_core.authenticators import IAMAuthenticator

authenticator = IAMAuthenticator('{apikey}')
text_to_speech = TextToSpeechV1(
    authenticator=authenticator
)

text_to_speech.set_service_url('{url}')

with open('hello_world.wav', 'wb') as audio_file:
    audio_file.write(
        text_to_speech.synthesize(
            'Hello world',
            voice='en-US_AllisonVoice',
            accept='audio/wav'        
        ).get_result().content)

that's not what i want , I want to be able to play the audio without saving it, how can i do that.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 17 '19 at 17:29

If you are open for external libraries, you can install vlc binding for python using pip install python-vlc

And use player method to play audio directly from the content as below.

import vlc
from ibm_watson import TextToSpeechV1
from ibm_cloud_sdk_core.authenticators import IAMAuthenticator

authenticator = IAMAuthenticator('{apikey}')
text_to_speech = TextToSpeechV1(
    authenticator=authenticator
)

text_to_speech.set_service_url('{url}')


#define VLC instance
instance = vlc.Instance('--input-repeat=-1', '--fullscreen')

#Define VLC player
player=instance.media_player_new()

#Define VLC media
media=instance.media_new(
text_to_speech.synthesize(
            'Hello world',
            voice='en-US_AllisonVoice',
            accept='audio/wav').get_result().content)

#Set player media
player.set_media(media)

#Play the media
player.play()

Advantage of vlc player is that you can play most media types directly from URL (not just mp3) and also perform player like options such as

>>> play.pause()  #pause play back
>>> player.play() #resume play back
>>> player.stop() #stop play back

*credits

How to listen to IBM Watson Text To Speech result without saving to a file (python)

1 Answers1