Language processing is an important component of many applications. In this chapter, we will demonstrate how to determine the natural language in use, how to translate from one language to another, and how we can convert between text and speech.

There may be times when we are not sure which language we are dealing with. When this happens, we have several techniques that we can use. We will illustrate how this is done using LingPipe, Google, and Amazon libraries.

To translate between languages, we will use Google and Amazon; they both support a large number of languages and use a client/server approach. A client application will send a request to a server, which will respond with the translated text. These approaches require a bit more work than other approaches since we need to deal with communication and security.

Converting text to speech has a large number of applications, as does the inverse, that is, converting speech to text. We will use Google libraries to demonstrate these techniques.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Detecting the natural language in use using LingPipe
• Discovering supported languages using the Google API
• Detecting the natural language in use using the Google API
• Language translation using Google
• Language detection and translation using Amazon AWS
• Converting text to speech using the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API
• Converting speech to text using the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API