Build a Text to Speech App in Node.js and Express Using Google Text to Speech (GTTS) Library

To build a Text-to-Speech (TTS) app in Node.js and Express using the Google Text to Speech (GTTS) library, follow these steps:

Step 1: Set up a new Node.js project.

Create a new directory for your project, navigate to it in a terminal, and run the following commands:

npm init -y

npm i gtts express

Step 2: Create an Express server.

Create a new file named server.js in the root directory of your project and add the following code:

const express = require('express');
const gtts = require('gtts');

const app = express();

app.get('/tts', (req, res) => {
  const { text } = req.query;

  if (!text) {
    return res.status(400).json({ error: 'Text parameter is missing' });
  }

  const speech = gtts(text, 'en');
  speech
    .stream()
    .pipe(res.contentType('audio/mp3'));
});

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server is running on port ${port}`);
});

const express = require('express');

const gtts = require('gtts');

const app = express();

app.get('/tts', (req, res) => {

const { text } = req.query;

if (!text) {

return res.status(400).json({ error: 'Text parameter is missing' });

}

const speech = gtts(text, 'en');

speech

.stream()

.pipe(res.contentType('audio/mp3'));

});

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Server is running on port ${port}`);

});

In the code above, we require the express and gtts modules. We create an Express server and define a single route for the TTS functionality.

The /tts route expects a text query parameter, which represents the text to be converted to speech. If the text parameter is missing, the server will return a JSON error response with a status of 400.

When the text parameter is present, we create a new instance of the gtts object with the text and language code ('en' for English). We then use the stream() method to get a readable stream of the generated audio and pipe it to the response with the content type set to audio/mp3.

Step 3: Start the server.

In the terminal, run the following command to start the server: