Skill: lnj22/pg-essay-to-audiobook-gtts (version 0.1.0)

--- name: gtts description: "Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS) for converting text to audio. Use when creating audiobooks, podcasts, or speech synthesis from text. Handles long text by chunking at sentence boundaries and concatenating audio segments with pydub." --- # Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS) gTTS is a Python library that converts text to speech using Google's Text-to-Speech API. It's free to use and doesn't require an API key. ## Installation ```bash pip install gtts pydub ``` pydub is useful for manipulating and concatenating audio files. ## Basic Usage ```python from gtts import gTTS # Create speech tts = gTTS(text="Hello, world!", lang='en') # Save to file tts.save("output.mp3") ``` ## Language Options ```python # US English (default) tts = gTTS(text="Hello", lang='en') # British English tts = gTTS(text="Hello", lang='en', tld='co.uk') # Slow speech tts = gTTS(text="Hello", lang='en', slow=True) ``` ## Python Example for Long Text ```python from gtts import gTTS from pydub import AudioSegment import tempfile import os import re def chunk_text(text, max_chars=4500): """Split text into chunks at sentence boundaries.""" sentences = re.split(r'(?<=[.!?])\s+', text) chunks = [] current_chunk = "" for sentence in sentences: if len(current_chunk) + len(sentence) < max_chars: current_chunk += sentence + " " else: if current_chunk: chunks.append(current_chunk.strip()) current_chunk = sentence + " " if current_chunk: chunks.append(current_chunk.strip()) return chunks def text_to_audiobook(text, output_path): """Convert long text to a single audio file.""" chunks = chunk_text(text) audio_segments = [] for i, chunk in enumerate(chunks): # Create temp file for this chunk with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='.mp3', delete=False) as tmp: tmp_path = tmp.name # Generate speech tts = gTTS(text=chunk, lang='en', slow=False) tts.save(tmp_path) # Load and append segment = AudioSegment.from_mp3(tmp_path) audio_segments.append(segment) # Cleanup os.unlink(tmp_path) # Concatenate all segments combined = audio_segments[0] for segment in audio_segments[1:]: combined += segment # Export combined.export(output_path, format="mp3") ``` ## Handling Large Documents gTTS has a character limit per request (~5000 chars). For long documents: 1. Split text into chunks at sentence boundaries 2. Generate audio for each chunk using gTTS 3. Use pydub to concatenate the chunks ## Alternative: Using ffmpeg for Concatenation If you prefer ffmpeg over pydub: ```bash # Create file list echo "file 'chunk1.mp3'" > files.txt echo "file 'chunk2.mp3'" >> files.txt # Concatenate ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i files.txt -c copy output.mp3 ``` ## Best Practices - Split at sentence boundaries to avoid cutting words mid-sentence - Use `slow=False` for natural speech speed - Handle network errors gracefully (gTTS requires internet) - Consider adding brief pauses between chapters/sections ## Limitations - Requires internet connection (uses Google's servers) - Voice quality is good but not as natural as paid services - Limited voice customization options - May have rate limits for very heavy usage


Security scan verdicts — ClawScan: clean | static analysis: clean | VirusTotal: clean | SkillSpector: clean (LOW)