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gsay: Fetch pronunciation of English vocabulary from Google

gsay: Fetch pronunciation of English vocabulary from Google

5 comments

·October 13, 2025
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myfonj

I've made something (probably) very similar for quick GB vs US pronunciation check that also leeches on Google's snapshot of what I believe is a licensed copy of the Oxford collection the same way the shell script does, but mine "runs in browser's URL bar" instead. It's a super tiny dataURI HTML document, intended to be bookmarked with a keyword (say, "say"):

    data:text/html;charset=utf-8,<title>US-GB pronunciation 2.0.1</title><body onload=x='https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/' text=snow bgcolor=black><button onfocus=this.click() onclick=(e=this.firstChild).src=x+i.value+'--_us_1.mp3';e.play()><audio onplay=i.focus()></audio>US</button><input id=i placeholder=(shift+)tab value="%s"><button onfocus=this.click() onclick=(e=this.firstChild).src=x+i.value+'--_gb_1.mp3';e.play()><audio onplay=i.focus()></audio>GB</button>
so when I do

    Alt+D, "say something", Enter
then hitting Tab plays it in British and Shift+Tab plays it in US English. It uses older 2016 batch, because I totally adore the US voice in it: just listen to "music" [1] and tell it isn't pure ASMR.

(I'm afraid it just a matter of time they will prevent our mischief, though.)

[0] oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com uses the same collection. [1] https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/mu...

IAmBroom

Dubiously, I clicked. Yeah, I could listen to her read the dictionary as I waft off to sleep...

myfonj

Ha ha, really glad to hear that. (The fact is, I am kinda freak/junkie about human voices, and that particular one stands really high on my list of irresistible tingles-inducing specimens. So happy to hear I am not alone.)

giancarlostoro

English is not my first language, and I didn't realize it was "google say" at first, so I was sitting here scratching my head wondering how you could possibly pronounce this word. Interesting that it's a shell script and not so much a browser extension or something. I guess this is for when you're knee deep in terminals?

pooyamo

> I guess this is for when you're knee deep in terminals?

One can use it directly in terminal or it can be used as a dependency tool in other scripts similar to the way other UNIX tools are used. For example I use it as a pronunciation player in my dictionary dict-master [1]. It's a shell script too.

Another example (run two times so it uses the cache the second time):

  echo this unix pipeline is poor man text to speech | xargs -n 1 gsay
[1]: https://github.com/pvonmoradi/dict-master