Google's text to mp3 URL-based API

403's with wget user-agent.<p><pre><code> pwillis@bobdobbs ~/ :) wget "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers" --10:11:36-- http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers =&#62; `translate_tts?q=hello+hackers.1' Resolving translate.google.com... 74.125.91.100, 74.125.91.101, 74.125.91.102, ... Connecting to translate.google.com|74.125.91.100|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden 10:11:37 ERROR 403: Forbidden. pwillis@bobdobbs ~/ :( wget -U "Lynx 1.2.3.4" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers" --10:11:41-- http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers =&#62; `translate_tts?q=hello+hackers.1' Resolving translate.google.com... 74.125.91.138, 74.125.91.139, 74.125.91.100, ... Connecting to translate.google.com|74.125.91.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 6,192 (6.0K) [audio/mpeg] 100%[====================================&#62;] 6,192 --.--K/s 10:11:41 (103.07 KB/s) - `translate_tts?q=hello+hackers.1' saved [6192/6192]</code></pre>

I posted this to reddit a month ago<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a52in/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a52in/</a><p>And previously there was a TTS engine on youtube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/preview_comment?q=hello%20Mr.%20Anderson&#38;t=-XoSYL20xbD-e4ZeoecPL6h56hh8MTIzMjYzMTg4OQ==" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/preview_comment?q=hello%20Mr.%20Ander...</a><p>where t is defined in the page HTML<p><pre><code> var previewCommentToken = '-XoSYL20xbD-e4ZeoecPL6h56hh8MTIzMjYzMTg4OQ%3D%3D';</code></pre>

This looks to be a part of their translation service, not explicitly a public TTS API and may be subject to use restrictions.

404?

The input string appears to be limited to 100 characters in length.<p>Still very interesting though. I hope Google publish this as a more formal API.

Any other query string options?

This technology has been around for so long that I hope Google or someone will push it to the point of sounding much more human like instead of so robotic-like.