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How to convert picture to sound in Python

jordankalebu May 7, 2020 7 Comments

Hello, Guys on this tutorial I will guide to convert a picture to a sound using python, in which we are going to cover Optical character recognition to detect text from the image and Speech synthesis to synthesize the speech from decoded text.

Project Requirements

In order for you to complete follow through this tutorial, you’re supposed to have the following library installed on your machine.

Python Imaging Libary (Pillow) for reading images
Python-tesseract (OCR Tool) for converting picture to text
gTTS (Google text to speech) for converting text to sound

Installation

$ pip install Pillow
$ pip install gTTS
$ pip install pytesseract

Also in order pytesseract to work you have to install Google’s Tesseract-OCR Engine on your operating system.

To install Tesseract Engine , CLICK HERE to get full instruction on installation with respect to your operating system

Now after Everything is installed , let’s start building our program

Project Folder

On your project folder you should have a sample image containing text on it which we could use to test our program

.
├── app.py
└── image.jpg
0 directories, 2 files

Our project will be divided into two main parts

Converting the image to Text (OCR)
Converting Text to speech (Speech Synthesis)

How do we convert image to string of text ?

At this stage, we use the python imagining library (pillow) to load our image and then pytesseract to perform Optical character recognition(OCR) so as to detect all the recognizable characters from our image.

On this we gonna use Pillow library

In the example below I used this image

Example of Usage

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from pytesseract import image_to_string
>>> text = image_to_string(Image.open('image.jpg'))
'JOBS FILLnYﬂUR POCKET.nADVENTURESnFILL YOURnLIFE.'

That’s how you can easily perform OCR in just 1 line of code, now let’s go see how can we convert it to speech using gTTS

Converting Generated Text to speech

I have a separate article that explains different ways to convert the text to speech in Python you can review them here 3 ways to convert text to speech.

In this tutorial, We are going to use gTTS, google text to speech to convert our decoded text into sound.

The Syntax to performing text to speech is very simple you can also do it with just one line of code as shown in the example below

>>> from gtts import gTTS
>>> gTTS('Coding is awesome trust me').save('sound.mp3')

Final program

I made the below simple program using the knowledge we just learned above with the addition of a cleaner function to remove n in the generated text to make it easily convertible to sound.

from PIL import Image
from gtts import gTTS
from pytesseract import image_to_string

def image_to_sound(path_to_image):
    try:
        loaded_image = Image.open(path_to_image)

        decoded_text = image_to_string(loaded_image)

        cleaned_text = ' '.join(decoded_text.split('\n'))

        print(cleaned_text)
         
        sound = gTTS(cleaned_text, lang = 'en')

        sound.save('sound.mp3')      

        return True

    except Exception as bug:

        print('The bug thrown while excuting the code\n', bug)

        return
        
image_to_sound('image.jpg')
input()

When you run the above code, it will open our sample image, perform optical character recognition, clean generated text by removing \n, convert into sound by using gTTS