| Google TTS Voices Added to SitePal

We’ve just completed our first 3^rd Party Text-To-Speech integration – with Google Cloud TTS leading the way. This integration adds 284 Google voices to SitePal. 

Before proceeding we’d like to make clear:

• Using the new voices requires integrating your Google Cloud account with your SitePal account. This is done by adding your Google API key to your SitePal account’s “Connect” page. This is not difficult and requires no coding.
• Thus the cost of generating the Google voices (if any) is borne by you, and not included in the SitePal subscription cost. Please bear in mind.
• 3^rd Party TTS voice integration requires the SitePal Platinum Plan.

The integration covers Google’s Standard, Wavenet & Neural voices. For a complete list of the added voices, see our API Reference – see Engine 11 in Appendix B.

To try out the newly added voices, see:  https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices

Note: some newly added Google Voices might not yet be available in SitePal, we’ll be adding those periodically.

Google voices can now be used in SitePal just like any of our built-in voices. The new voices can be used either Statically or Dynamically. 

Statically – created using the UI in your SitePal account, and then assigned to your Scenes.

Dynamically – real time via the SitePal API. Response times and performance are excellent. 

Tips: 

• If the audios that your avatar will speak are known in advance, it would be best to manually create, name & save the audios in your SitePal account, and then use the “sayAudio” API call to invoke speech dynamically (as opposed to using “sayText”). Doing so means that we will not access the Google API at runtime, thereby saving usage costs. 
• Separately – it’s worth noting that SitePal caches dynamic TTS and if an audio is frequently used it will likely be delivered from the cache. This optimization is built-in – you don’t need to do anything to turn it on.

We’re working on integrating additional 3^rd Party TTS providers, with AWS Poly, MS-Azure and Eleven Labs next on our list.

Last but not least! – we’ve recently introduced great new Robotic characters, available now to all SitePal plans. Check out our entire collection here: www.sitepal.com/collection

Stay tuned for more updates… 

Warm Regards,

The SitePal Team

www.sitepal.com

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