My life on the web

Last month Google unveiled enhancements to Google Translate. Among the new features was a simple text-to-speech function. You can try it out, or watch this video to see how it works (skip to 0:45). There’s no official API for the text-to-speech service. But Weston Ruter noticed that anyone can access the service in the same way Google does: “Looking at the Firebug Net panel for where this TTS data was coming from, I saw that the speech audio is in MP3 format and is queried via a simple HTTP GET (REST) request: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text” Translation: just change the URL to whatever you want it to say and you’ll get back a MP3 file. Example: copy the URL http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=I+love+techcrunch into your browser. This is English only for now, and its limited to 100 characters. But unless Google shuts this down, third party applications can now use this in any creative way they want. Have at it. Via Ajaxian. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors