PDF File Text to Audio Speech Conversion Using Python

Have you ever wanted to take a PDF file you are reading and simply give it to a program and have that program read the contents of the PDF to you? Here’s how you can do it.

Required Libraries

First, we need to install the necessary libraries. We require two libraries to build this.

1. PyPDF2

A Pure-Python library built as a PDF toolkit. It is capable of extracting document information splitting documents page by page merging documents page by page cropping pages merging multiple pages into a single page encrypting and decrypting PDF files and more!

So, open your terminal and run the following command.

pip install PyPDF2

2. pyttsx3

pyttsx3 is a text-to-speech conversion library in Python. Unlike alternative libraries, it works offline and is compatible with both Python 2 and 3.

So, open your terminal and run the following command.

pip install pyttsx3

Steps to be followed

STEP 1

As we have installed the packages, we can import them into our program.

import pyttsx3

import PyPDF2

import win32api

STEP 2

Now, we need to open our file in reading format and store it in a book. The name of the pdf file is demo.pdf. rb stands for reading mode.

file = open(‘demo.pdf’,’rb’)

STEP 3

Now, we will call PyPDF2’s PdfFileReader method on file and store it into pdf_reader

pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(book)

STEP 4

Now let’s calculate the number of pages in our pdf by using the numPages method on pdf_reader and store in num_pages.

num_pages = pdf_reader.numPages

STEP 5

Now let’s initialize pyttsx3 using the init method and let’s print playing PDF File

play = pyttsx3.init()
print(‘Playing PDF File’)

STEP 6

Now, let’s run a loop for the number of pages in our pdf file. A page will get retrieved at each iteration.

for num in range(0,num_pages):
page = pdf_reader.getPage(num)
data= page.extractText()
play.say(data)
play.runAndWait()

Moving forward, let’s extract the text from our page using the extractText method on our page and store it into data.

Next, we will call say method on data, and finally, we can call runAndWait method at the end.

Run the python script and your PDF File content will play.

Complete Code

import pyttsx3
import PyPDF2
file = open(‘demo.pdf’,’rb’)
pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(file)
num_pages = pdf_reader.numPages
play = pyttsx3.init()
print(‘Playing PDF File’)
for num in range(0,num_pages):
page = pdf_reader.getPage(num)
data= page.extractText()
play.say(data)
play.runAndWait()

Author:

Apoorva Uthra - Pune, Maharashtra, India | Professional Profile | LinkedIn

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