Aim of the experiment was to find a way to create an audio output within touch designer that read text and converted it to speech.

Possible ways of adding in the plugin/library were:

• Eleven Labs Touch designer plugin
  • AI based, requires credits.
  • Requires an active internet connection to call the API
  • 10,000 credits on the free plan, roughly 10 minute of speech
• Google Cloud API
  • Requires a google cloud account
  • Can’t find exact pricing, its on a pay as you go model
  • No ready made plugins for Touch designer
• gTTs (Google Translate Text to Speech)
  • Runs locally on the device
  • Uses Google translates text to speech protocol
  • Free/not credit based
  • Works with the gTTS library in python
  • Works within touch designer through the python environment
  • Great for a prototype and testing
  • Not great with voice modulation and tone of voice generation

gTTS in action

Screen Recording 2025-07-18 at 6.16.12 PM.mov