Text to Speech Speaker supports a wide range of languages for both OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and text-to-speech playback. The OCR engine can recognize text in over 100 languages and scripts. Text-to-speech voice availability depends on the voices installed on your device. Below is a comprehensive guide to language support.
| Language | OCR Support | TTS Support | Script |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Excellent | All devices | Latin |
| Chinese (Simplified) | Excellent | Most devices | Han (Simplified) |
| Chinese (Traditional) | Excellent | Most devices | Han (Traditional) |
| Malay | Very Good | Most devices | Latin |
| Hindi | Very Good | Most devices | Devanagari |
| Tamil | Good | Most devices | Tamil |
| Spanish | Excellent | All devices | Latin |
| French | Excellent | All devices | Latin |
| Arabic | Good | Most devices | Arabic |
| Japanese | Excellent | Most devices | Kanji/Kana |
| Korean | Excellent | Most devices | Hangul |
| German | Excellent | All devices | Latin |
| Portuguese | Excellent | All devices | Latin |
| Russian | Excellent | Most devices | Cyrillic |
| Italian | Excellent | All devices | Latin |
| Thai | Good | Most devices | Thai |
| Vietnamese | Good | Most devices | Latin (extended) |
| Indonesian | Very Good | Most devices | Latin |
| Turkish | Very Good | Many devices | Latin |
| Dutch | Excellent | Many devices | Latin |
| Polish | Excellent | Many devices | Latin |
| Swedish | Excellent | Many devices | Latin |
| Norwegian | Excellent | Many devices | Latin |
| Danish | Excellent | Many devices | Latin |
| Finnish | Excellent | Many devices | Latin |
| Greek | Very Good | Many devices | Greek |
| Hebrew | Good | Many devices | Hebrew |
| Ukrainian | Very Good | Some devices | Cyrillic |
| Romanian | Very Good | Many devices | Latin |
| Czech | Very Good | Many devices | Latin |
| Hungarian | Very Good | Many devices | Latin |
| Bengali | Good | Some devices | Bengali |
| Telugu | Good | Some devices | Telugu |
| Kannada | Good | Some devices | Kannada |
| Malayalam | Good | Some devices | Malayalam |
| Urdu | Good | Some devices | Arabic |
OCR accuracy varies by language and script type. Latin-script languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese produce the highest accuracy rates. These languages benefit from well-established character recognition models and are less affected by font variations. CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) also perform well, particularly with printed text using standard fonts. Right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew produce good results but may require careful image alignment. Indic scripts such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali work well with clearly printed text but may struggle with highly stylized or decorative fonts. For all languages, OCR accuracy improves with higher resolution images, good lighting, clean backgrounds, and standard fonts.
The voices available in Text to Speech Speaker come directly from your device's operating system. This means the selection varies between devices, operating systems, and manufacturers. Generally, English voices are available on every device. Major world languages like Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic are available on most modern devices. Less common languages may require you to install additional voice packs from your device settings. Android users can install voice data through Settings, then General Management, then Text-to-Speech, then Install voice data. iPhone users can add voices through Settings, then Accessibility, then Spoken Content, then Voices. The tool will display a warning if it cannot find a matching voice for the detected language, and will guide you to install the appropriate voice pack.
When you press play, the tool automatically analyses your text to determine the language. For non-Latin scripts like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil, Thai, and Russian, detection is highly reliable because each script has a unique character range. For Latin-script languages, the tool checks for language-specific keywords and patterns. English is the default for any Latin-script text unless another language has very strong distinctive signals. You can always override the auto-detection by manually selecting a different voice from the dropdown. The auto-detection works with text of any length, though longer texts produce more reliable results.
If you want voices for additional languages, you can install them directly from your device settings. On Android, go to Settings, then General Management, then Text-to-Speech. Tap on your preferred TTS engine (Samsung or Google), then select Install voice data. Choose the languages you want and download them. On iPhone, go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Spoken Content, then Voices. Browse the available languages and tap the download icon next to the voices you want. After installation, return to Text to Speech Speaker and tap the refresh button next to the Voice dropdown to see the new voices. Each voice pack is typically between 10 and 50 megabytes depending on the language and quality.
If you regularly work with multiple languages, install voice packs for all the languages you use. The tool will automatically switch between voices when it detects a different language. For mixed-language text (for example, an English article with Chinese names), the tool will select the dominant language. You can always manually switch the voice if needed. For OCR, select the matching language from the OCR language dropdown before scanning - this improves accuracy significantly for non-English text. When using the camera feature for multilingual signs or documents, select the primary language of the text you want to capture.