“Chinese - Cantonese” Google TTS

Question

I try to use google TTS as:

http://www.translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hello

That works perfect for me. However, it cannot speak "Chinese - Cantonese", for example:

http://www.translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=zh-TW&q=你好

only speaks Mandarin

Can anyone tell me how to let it speak "Cantonese".

I tried to google for this but, it seems that Cantonese TTS has not released. It is true?

Answer 1

The Text-To-Speech functionality that Google Translate uses is experimental so not all languages are available at present.

This is taken from the Google Translate Support document:

An experimental text-to-speech system (TTS) is available for several other languages, powered by the eSpeak open-source speech synthesizer: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. You may notice significant differences in speech quality between the experimental languages and the other available languages.

_{Note: Correct as at 24th May 2011}

Answer 2

You could try ZhongWen Learner. There's an annotation tool where you can paste the characters, click Go and the get the jyutping. After that, you can click the play button and the sounds will be read back to you.