Play Google Translate's text to speech audio directly on your rails webpage

gistfile1.rb

#This will allow you to serve google TTS audio from your own domain, allowing you to use it in the source for HTML5 audio tags.

#tts_controller.rb

class TtsController < ApplicationController
  def pipe
    queryString = params[:query_string] #.gsub(. . ., '')
    lang = params[:lang] #Language code; see https://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-language-codes
    require 'net/http'
    url = URI.parse('http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=' + lang + '&q=' + URI::encode(queryString))
    req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url.to_s)
    res = Net::HTTP.start(url.host, url.port) {|http|
      http.request(req)
    }
    send_data(res.body, :disposition => "inline", :filename => "sound.mp3", :type => "audio/mpeg")
  end
end


#routes.rb
scope :api do
  get "/tts/:lang/:query_string/" => "tts#pipe"
end


#javascript on your page

=begin

var audioElement = document.createElement('audio');
var playAudio = function (string, lang) {
  audioElement.setAttribute('src', 'api/tts/' + lang + '/' + encodeURIComponent(string)
}

=end