Thread:Talk:RPi Text to Speech (Speech Synthesis)/Google Text to Speech not working

Festival and Espeak work, but the shell script for Google Text to Speech thinks for a minute and then comes back with the prompt. This was fixed with the solution offered at http://stackoverflow.com/a/32053452/447830

Add the qualifier '&client=tw-ob' to the end of your query. https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=test&tl=zh-TW&client=tw-ob This answer no longer works consistently. Your ip address will be blocked by google temporarily if you abuse this too much.

Others point out that it does not matter what value is assigned to client, claiming client=whateva would work. This was not my experience. tw-ob worked, whateva did not.