Can’t you find a text to speech software with Cantonese voices? Don’t worry! We got you covered!
Regarding Chinese, speech synthesis tools always support the well-known Mandarin Chinese dialect. But there’s more to Chinese culture. Cantonese is also a regional variation and shares the same underlying alphabet as Mandarin. Yet, their spoken languages are unique and incomprehensible to one another.
To be more specific, Cantonese is a Sino-Tibetan language that originated in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the Yue Chinese dialect group’s traditional prestige variant, with approximately 80 million native speakers. Plus, another 20 million people throughout the world (like Malaysia, for example) speak it.
Not to mention Cantonese is an exceptionally expressive language. As a result, it is the only tongue that can represent some texts correctly. When performed in Mandarin, they lose much, if not all, of its melody. That makes it a rich language tied up to people’s identities.
Thus, Cantonese deserves recognition by text to speech (TTS) instruments. Otherwise, those 100 million people worldwide won’t be able to listen to their websites, articles, blogs, books and other favourite content. Therefore, we searched for a text to speech software with Cantonese voices.
Woord
If you want an AI voice generator with a broad catalogue of voices, you are looking for Woord. This TTS tool produces high-quality, realistic voices across 28 languages, including dialects. So, yeah. It supports English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, Korean, etc., and Cantonese Chinese.
Apart from language, you can decide your spokesperson’s gender or no gender (male, female or neutral). And that’s not all. You can customise the audio by speeding it up, slowing it down or determining an effect revolving device profile (IVR, Smarthome, GPS and other types of voices). Furthermore, Woord comes with an SSML editor that can arrange multiple traits of your speaker. So don’t be afraid to emphasise words, whisper sentences, add breaks and play with phonemes, among other things.
All in all, users can hear their content (pdf, txt, doc(x), pages, odt, ppt(x), ods, non-DRM epub, jpeg, and png) in their native language by enjoying 50 distinct voices. Moreover, Woord contains all the advanced features that a text-to-speech programme requires: OCR technology for scanning photos, MP3 download for preserving –and maybe redistributing– your audio, API access for developers, and a Chrome plugin to make it all easier than it already is:
- Type, paste or upload your input.
- Choose Cantonese as a language. Then, select the other attributes you want on your output.
- Click on ‘Speak It’
- That’s it! Within seconds you will get your Cantonese voice.
Are you ready to enjoy listening to texts in Cantonese? Comment!