Free Text-To-Speech and Text-to-MP3 for Chinese Mandarin

How to convert Chinese Mandarin text to MP3

1. Type or paste your text into the box above (up to 3,000 characters per day for free).
2. Choose a voice from the list.
3. Click Read to listen in your browser, or Download as MP3 to save the audio file.

No account, no app and no AWS account are needed. Longer texts are processed in the background; please keep the page open until the audio is ready.

Free limit and premium plans

The free converter allows 3,000 characters per day (about 375 words). Your usage today is shown below the converter and resets every day.

Need more? Premium plans range from a 24-hour pass to monthly and yearly plans with up to 10 million characters. Every yearly plan includes access to the text-to-speech API.

Commercial use of the MP3 files

You may use the MP3 files created with ttsMP3 in commercial and non-commercial projects – for example YouTube voiceovers, podcasts, presentations, e-learning courses, websites and apps. This applies to free and paid usage, and you do not have to credit ttsMP3 (a mention is always appreciated). See commercial use of text to speech for details.

Chinese Mandarin voices

For Chinese Mandarin you can choose between these voices: Zhiyu. All of them are Amazon Polly voices and pronounce your text with a native Chinese Mandarin accent. In total ttsMP3 offers 74 regular voices in 41 languages and accents.

Pauses, emphasis, speed and pitch (SSML)

You can control the speech with SSML tags directly in your text. Here are the most useful ones:

Add a break

Mary had a little lamb <break time="1s"/> Whose fleece was white as snow.

Emphasizing words

I already told you I <emphasis level="strong">really like</emphasis> that person.

Speed

For dramatic purposes, you might wish to <prosody rate="slow">slow down the speaking rate of your text.</prosody>
Or if you are in a hurry <prosody rate="fast">you may want to speed it up a bit.</prosody>

Pitch

Do you like synthesized speech <prosody pitch="high">with a pitch that is higher than normal?</prosody>
Or do you prefer your speech <prosody pitch="-20%">with a somewhat lower pitch?</prosody>

Whisper

<amazon:effect name="whispered">If you make any noise,</amazon:effect> she said, <amazon:effect name="whispered">they will hear us.</amazon:effect>

Conversations

You can switch between speakers within one text:

[speaker:Brian] Hello Emma
[speaker:Emma] Hey Brian
[speaker:Brian] How are you doing?
[speaker:Emma] I am fine. May I invite you to a cup of tea?

Please remove diacritical signs from the speaker names: Léa = Lea, Penélope = Penelope.

Need more effects? See our SSML guide with examples or the Amazon SSML tags for Amazon Polly.

Facts about the Chinese Mandarin language:

Chinese, with its ancient origins and complex writing system, is not just a single language but a group of languages or dialects numbering over a hundred. Mandarin Chinese (普通话), the official language of China and Taiwan, is the most spoken language globally, with over a billion native speakers. However, the Chinese language family also includes other major dialects like Cantonese (粤语), Shanghainese (上海话), and Hokkien (闽南语), each with its own unique phonetic, lexical, and syntactic characteristics.

The roots of Chinese can be traced back more than 3,000 years to the earliest logographic writing, known as oracle bone script, used during the Shang Dynasty for divination purposes. Over the millennia, Chinese characters have evolved through several stages—bronze inscriptions, seal script, clerical script, regular script, and more—mirroring the changes in Chinese society and governance.

A remarkable feature of the Chinese language is its writing system, consisting of thousands of characters, or "hanzi" (汉字). Each character typically represents one syllable and, by extension, a morpheme, which is the smallest semantic unit of meaning in a language. Unlike alphabetic writing systems, Chinese characters do not provide direct cues to pronunciation but rather embody meaning through intricate combinations of strokes and radicals.

The 20th century brought significant change to the Chinese language, most notably with the May Fourth Movement of 1919 which promoted language reform and the creation of "baihua" (白话), a push for written vernacular Chinese over the classical "wenyanwen" (文言文). The midpoint of the century saw the introduction of Hanyu Pinyin, a romanization system designed to standardize pronunciation and facilitate learning. In tandem with these linguistic reforms was the simplification of Chinese characters in mainland China, aimed at improving literacy rates and modern communication.

Despite these modern adaptations, Chinese remains a tonal language, where meaning is distinguished not just by phonemes but by pitch and intonation. With its four main tones and one neutral tone in Mandarin, the language offers a rich tapestry of semantic possibilities. As it continues to spread and influence globally, Chinese carries with it the legacy of one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations, a testament to human culture and adaptability.

Supported voice languages: